Death of a Member: Lord Clyde
	 — 
	Announcement

Baroness Hayman: My Lords, I regret to inform the House of the death of Lord Clyde on 6 March. On behalf of the House, I extend our condolences to the noble and learned Lord's family and friends.

Disabled Persons (Independent Living) Bill [HL]
	 — 
	Second Reading

Moved By Lord Ashley of Stoke
	That the Bill be read a second time.

Lord Ashley of Stoke: My Lords, the Second Reading is an important stage of any Bill, but this is the third Second Reading that this Bill has been given. On the previous two occasions, the Government gave the Bill a warm welcome but then said, "Thanks, but no thanks". I hope that they will give a different response today.
	In preparing the Bill, I have been assisted by the Royal Association for Disability and Rehabilitation, led by Caroline Ellis, and another significant contributor is my personal assistant, Trina Pott.
	Basically, the Government's objections boil down to the cost of the Bill, its timing or the need for it at all; there is, they imply, sufficient legislation for Britain's 11 million disabled people. Let us examine that statement and see whether they still stick by it. It is nonsense to say that there is sufficient legislation for these 11 million people because if the legal and other provisions were adequate there would not be the sustained protests from millions of disabled people and there would be no need for a Minister for Disabled People. How can the Government claim that there is no need for this Bill when the vast majority of councils refuse to support disabled people within their areas? Some councils provide the absolute minimum of social assistance; they provide food and a wash for people in need. It is a policy dictated by a Scrooge-like mentality, but it is not good enough and must be changed.
	Suggestions and recommendations from the Government and other authorities are fine, but they are not a patch on mandatory provisions. The Bill would ensure that responsibility for providing wider resources is made obligatory. In other words, disabled people would be entitled to the provisions and would not need to argue for them. For example, the Bill would place a clear duty on local authorities and NHS bodies to co-operate between themselves and with key partners to provide the means of independent living. It would require them to provide funds whenever necessary to deliver the duties contained in the Bill. This would avoid the multiple assessments, delays in augmentation and the fragmentation in care which exists at present. Significant gains would be made by the Bill.
	The Bill provides a clear right to self-assessment of disabled people's requirements for assistance and support. This is the very heart of the Bill. The right to self-assessment of their requirements is crucial and would ensure that any support given is what the people themselves want and need, rather than their having to wait for the local authority to give them what it thinks they ought to have. So far, disabled people have been expected to fit into services, but the Bill provides that services should be personalised after assessment and therefore suit the person. It also provides that disabled people should be empowered to determine where they live and who they live with. If the Bill is passed, it would be unlawful to force anyone into an institution against their will. Today there are people who have been sent into institutions against there will, which is shocking and disgraceful.
	As a lack of information can cripple any efforts to provide for disabled people, the Bill provides that authorities would have to identify all the disabled people in their area and maintain a register. They would also have to provide a wide range of assistance, such as communication aids and other forms of helpful equipment, technology, independent advocacy and practical assistance in the home and elsewhere.
	There would be a new system of individualised budgets. The present range of different services to help with personal care, support, equipment and adaptations would all be brought together. Disabled people would be able to use their individual budgets in the form of care or social services, or a mixture of both, to spend on housing, equipment, personal assistance, transport or whatever they desire.
	A crucial part of the Bill is that regulations would be made specifying minimum outcomes. That is designed to prevent local authorities from wriggling out of their responsibilities. Regulations would ensure that there was no doubt about where that responsibility lay.
	Of course these changes would have to be paid for, but we need to bear in mind the important economic benefits of investing in independent living. As people become independent and return to work, they earn from employment and pay taxes. There would also be savings on the social security budget. Another consequence would be a reduction in manpower for social services as people became active and got back to work.
	Disabled people have always found housing to be a bugbear, but the Bill would create a disability housing service. Each local authority would have to provide a list of accessible properties and a record of disabled people requiring such properties, and then provide a matching service. The terrible shortfall of accessible housing would no longer be a problem because people would be fitted to properties through that matching service, or to new dwellings of whatever type. That would be a huge saving for the authorities and avoid the heavy cost of later adaptations.
	Nowhere in the existing community care provisions will we find any reference to choice, control, dignity or equality. Disabled people are as much entitled to those as anybody else but social services departments routinely make decisions that contradict those fundamental values. We intend to stop that.
	The Bill would empower disabled people to assess their own support and needs, but if they needed an advocate they could get one. That would give the disabled person the right to be told what they are entitled to and to create their own package. It would give people a real choice between managing their budget with practical assistance, by replacing it with a trusted person or an organisation to manage it on their behalf, or taking statutory services in lieu of cash. These are important changes.
	The new framework would provide for a national minimum guaranteed entitlement so that postcode lotteries were eradicated. It would make freedom of movement possible for disabled people. By introducing portable support pages, disabled people could move from one local authority to another for jobs or other reasons. That would negate the necessity of undergoing another assessment to negotiate another package from scratch.
	The Bill would also fill the legal gap of the absence in law of offering protection against unnecessary institutionalisation. It would prevent a person being institutionalised against their wishes or on the grounds of financial expediency. For those in private and voluntary care homes, the Bill would provide the full protection of the Human Rights Act.
	I offer the Bill to the House as the best hope of a "New Deal" for Britain's disabled people. They have suffered neglect and even ostracism for too long. It is time that they came in from the cold. I beg to move.

Baroness Verma: My Lords, I declare an interest as a provider of adult social care. I thank the noble Lord, Lord Ashley of Stoke, for introducing this Bill again. My maiden speech in your Lordships' House was on this subject. Coming from the care sector, I sympathise very much with some of what is in the Bill. I shall concentrate on individual budgets and the support and advocacy that would be required to ensure that people using such budgets had all the right safeguards in place.
	In all the years that I have been in care provision, there have been huge changes in who is eligible for what type of care. Those of us who have supported independent living have become quite frustrated that the criteria have changed so much so quickly and that, instead of assisting people to become independent, it has made them more dependent and less able to communicate in the wider community. So I looked at the Bill carefully. On the basis that every human being has the right to live their lives to the best of their ability, we should look at some of the serious issues that it raises.
	The noble Lord, Lord Ashley, is right to take a holistic approach to provision for people with disabilities. Such an approach ranges from how houses are built to how they can provide for people in the longer term, rather than saying that people can no longer stay in their homes but will have to go into institutionalised living. People are now living longer, but all of us will eventually become less able to manage our own lives as we are hit by the affects of age. It is worrying for most of us that we are not looking at issues such as how houses are built and how access is provided to services—particularly because we are dependent on 6 million voluntary carers. Those people also will eventually require care.
	Part of my business looks after people with severe disability, but much of the Bill is about people who are able to manage major parts of their lives and who need just light-touch support in care. I hope that when the Minister responds she will be able to give us a little more detail on the safeguards built around the individual budgets.
	I agree completely with the noble Lord that individuals should be able to assess themselves and participate in deciding the kind of care they receive. As often as not they are told, "In this care package you are going to get a wash in the morning and be put to bed in the evening". The rest of the day they have to manage by themselves, without access to the outside world—to shops, the theatre or cinema, the simple things that the rest of us take very much for granted. I hope that the Minister can give us some detail on the promotion of individual budgets and the safeguards behind them.
	I accept that we need to control how money given to individuals is spent, but who will be responsible if an individual budget is set? Who will be responsible for the CRB checks and the insurance behind the individual budgets? Who will be responsible for complying with the PAYE scheme? Who will be responsible for the sickness benefit of a person looking after somebody with an individual budget? Who will look after those areas of employment? With an individual budget you are largely employing somebody in your own right to carry out your care.
	As I look through the Bill, my heart goes out to the many people who do great work in this sector of care. However, social services have always been the poor relation of care in this country. If we are going to prevent greater dependency on the NHS, we will need to look at how to encourage a better quality of life for people within their own homes. It is disgraceful to assume that just because we cannot manage parts of our life we cannot manage the majority of it. Most disabled people, with the right support mechanisms, can do most of the things that the rest of us do.
	I have some very simple questions for the Minister which arise from reading the Bill. How much pressure is being put on local authorities to ensure that people with disabilities are able to access public places easily? Are facilities available for people who have wheelchairs or who use walking sticks or who may be partially sighted? Many public places and leisure centres are restricted in their access. What are the Government doing to encourage better access to transport? The worst thing for a person with disability is to find himself bound to his home, unable to go anywhere unless people are there to assist. I could go on at length about this huge issue but I shall not. My final question to the Minister is whether she will ensure that all new housing is built to a minimum standard so that wheelchair access is available in the long term and so that stairs are wide enough for stair-lifts should they be needed.

Baroness Campbell of Surbiton: My Lords, I warmly thank the noble Lord, Lord Ashley, for his dogged perseverance in bringing the Disabled Persons (Independent Living) Bill back before this House. I declare several interests in relation to it. First, I am a trustee of the National Centre for Independent Living. NCIL is a national organisation of disabled people which strongly supports the Bill. Its members are probably watching this debate on their computer screens across the country, so we are being watched avidly.
	Secondly, I have had the honour of chairing the government working group on the right to control. This work helped bring about the legislative commitment, enshrined in the Welfare Reform Act, to give disabled people control over any support service that increases active participation in the community, including work. Lastly and highly relevantly, I am a commissioner of the Equality and Human Rights Commission. I was recently privileged to be the lead commissioner on its report, From Safety Net to Springboard, which examines the state of social care and other public services addressed in the Bill. It sets out a number of recommendations that mirror much of the Bill's intent. It describes a "care crunch"—not a credit crunch—resulting from inadequate provision and missed opportunities which risk undermining Britain's future social and economic success by exacerbating inequalities, disregarding human rights and creating tensions between generations and social groups.
	The existing care and support system is seen as a marginal public service. It does not enjoy the status of health and education. It provides a safety net, propped up by individual goodwill among families. It is not treated as contributing positive social and economic outcomes. We at the commission believe that that is wrong. Social care has the potential to be a springboard for independent living, promoting the capabilities of individuals and their families to contribute socially and economically.
	The recommendations of the commission's report completely echo the provisions in this Bill. For example, the report proposes a national framework of guaranteed outcomes based on human rights principles, exactly as provided for in the Bill. It recommends action to ensure the availability of independent advocacy, also proposed in the Bill. Independent advocacy can make the difference between keeping and losing a job. It can mean the difference between being able to manage one's own support and budget and having that done for you.
	The vital importance of advocacy is highlighted by a man whom I shall call John. This is a story that I heard last week. John has a progressive neuromuscular impairment like mine. During a recent social care assessment, his local authority tried to withdraw funding for overnight assistance, arguing that it was a medical need. The local authority claimed that the purpose of being turned in the night was to avoid pressure sores. "But I have a ripple bed", he said; "it's not pressure sores, it's discomfort". But they insisted on deeming it a medical matter. John's local PCT rightly refused to fund this assistance, so the local authority said that being turned at night was not essential and that if John was uncomfortable he should take painkillers before he went to sleep. John said, "But what if I need a drink in the night?". "Drink more before you go to bed", they said. "But if I do that, I'll want to go to the loo". "Use a catheter", was their response.
	To be treated in this way is degrading and, arguably, contrary to the provisions of the Human Rights Act. John is young and articulate; he is in the legal profession as an advocate, and he was able eventually to rebut the local authority. However, he told me that fighting to preserve his dignity was incredibly difficult and demoralising. I fear that older disabled people and others who do not have such strength of character will fare less well; they will go to sleep tonight with discomfort and have to decide whether to take painkillers because there is no one there to assist them. Advocacy and access to peer support are essential tools in preventing abuse.
	Finally, I draw attention to the part of the Bill that will give disabled people the same freedom of movement as that enjoyed by our non-disabled peers. Noble Lords will know from the Health and Social Care Bill that I am intent on raising the issue of the inequality of non-portability. I should like the Minister to tell me how things are going on this issue, as she will remember that quite a few promises were made from her Bench during that debate. It is unacceptable that people cannot move between local authorities with their social care intact. Instead, they have to beg for resources all over again through the reassessment process. They are often subjected to different rules regarding who gets help and who does not. There is no guarantee that a new assessment will support or continue your way of life.
	The Government have already embarked on many positive steps, creating greater choice and control for disabled people. However, gross anomalies still abound, such as the absence of a clear entitlement to manage your support if you qualify for continuing health funding. We still have a system of statutory guidance that allows local authorities to restrict support in ways that thoroughly undermine human rights. We have a system in which those in residential care have fewer rights of review and redress than inmates of HM prisons. Such anomalies threaten lives, weaken families and damage our communities and economy. The noble Lord's Bill would remove these anomalies; it would free people not just to exist but to participate and contribute to society.
	The commission, and the Disability Rights Commission before it, is right to assert that the pace of change must accelerate to avoid damaging the social and economic fabric of our society. The noble Lord is offering us a vehicle to deliver that change. We cannot afford to say no again.

The Lord Bishop of Winchester: My Lords, it is a privilege to speak briefly in support of the noble Lord's third attempt to bring forward these very important proposals. It is a special privilege because, as Bishop with responsibility for Stoke-on-Trent before being called to Winchester, I hold him in particular admiration. It is also a privilege to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Campbell. As she spoke of the noble Lord's dogged perseverance, I thought, "It takes one to know one".
	I spoke yesterday in preparation for coming today with one of those responsible for the Southampton Centre for Independent Living—a major resource over the past 25 years or so for disabled people, led and run by them in my own diocese and across the centre of the south of England. That person, himself a disabled person, emphasised very strongly how urgently the centre, and organisations like it all over the country, want this Bill at last to reach the statute book. As I talked with him and thought of others that I know, I thought too of the vast amounts of money being spent to shore up the financial structures with very little assurance as to what their outcomes will be and the light that that sheds on the possibility, after all, of government being able to spend the necessary money to do this job well.
	I cannot pretend to expertise that I do not have, so I shall not engage in the details of the Bill; but that engagement will be important, as the noble Baroness, Lady Verma, noted, if the Bill is to gain its objectives. A whole series of detailed questions, of which hers were only some, must be well thought through by us in this House and the other place. I hope that is done with a sense of urgency to get the Bill through, rather than there being any kind of nitpicking that holds it up. I want simply to endorse what seem the fundamental and, as we have just heard, most important principles of independent living, set out in the noble Lord's speech and in those that have succeeded him.
	I end by offering this obvious but necessary observation. It is not only right in the basic meaning of the word to meet the needs, support to the greatest possible degree the independence and secure the rights of disabled people. A great deal that the rest of us receive from people who live with disabilities—both at the individual level, among those we meet or work with or who are among our friends, and more widely economically, as the noble Baroness, Lady Verma, pointed out—will be further increased and deepened as people with disabilities are able more consistently to live confidently and independently and with self respect, and do not have to deliver enormous quantities of what are often limited energies in fighting for their rights and what they need.

Lord Rix: My Lords,I welcome the Bill most warmly, and I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Ashley of Stoke, on his ceaseless efforts to promote independent living for disabled people. As president of Mencap, which represents both people with a learning disability and their families, and through my own personal experiences, I am only too aware that such a disability ensures discrimination and denial of choice and freedom, both for the learning-disabled person and for their family carers.
	In the past, Ministers have said that they support the principles of the Disabled Persons (Independent Living) Bill and that those of us campaigning on behalf of disabled people should be encouraged by recent changes in legislation and policy, which will transform disabled persons' lives.
	However, I wish to paint a very different picture of what is actually happening to disabled people, in particular the United Kingdom's one-and-a-half million people with a learning disability, as well as their families and carers. Only by introducing measures such as the ones in this Bill will we see tangible steps taken towards realising the Government's aim of equal citizenship for disabled people by 2025.
	Of course, we have come a long way since people with a learning disability were kept hidden from public view or segregated for life in so-called hospitals. But the sad fact is that increasingly inadequate funding and the tightening eligibility criteria for crucial social care is turning back the clock for many disabled people, leaving those with a mild or moderate learning disability receiving no support whatever, and much reduced support for those who remain entitled to care. Disabled people are being charged for previously free basic social services, even though we know they are already twice as likely as non-disabled people to be living in poverty. Meanwhile, family carers are left to plug these big gaps in basic care, many having to give up gainful employment to perform these relentless tasks.
	No doubt, the Minister will reply that some steps are gradually being taken towards the aim of equal citizenship, such as in the field of employment support for disabled people. That is absolutely correct, but when it comes to people with a learning disability, how might they cope in a new workplace if they have not had the training in social skills for which this Bill legislates, or if they have not been supported to participate in other inclusive activities throughout childhood and early adulthood? We need a holistic approach to independence and, for me, that is what the Bill is all about.
	For many with severe learning disabilities and their families, the crisis in care provision has been exacerbated following the recent campus closures in residential NHS care. The closure of these campuses is very welcome but too often results in a reduction of support for the individual as local authorities try to save money. I believe that the duties set out in the Bill would make it harder for local authorities to provide inadequate levels of support.
	My noble friend Lady Boothroyd raised this matter in her Oral Question to the Minister, Lord Darzi, last Tuesday. She asked:
	"Is he aware that local authorities have no legal obligation to provide 24-hour care services and that some have abandoned plans to build special housing?".
	Unfortunately, the Minister did not answer that extremely pertinent question directly, merely contenting himself with,
	"Government policy is clear: everyone could benefit from good support to live in the community if that support is tailored to their particular requirements. I cannot stress enough what at local level that personalised care should be about".—[Official Report, 10/3/09; col. 1053.]
	Your Lordships will no doubt note that in interpreting the Minister's response, there appears to be no statutory obligation on local authorities to provide good, or even adequate, services, exactly as spelt out by my noble friend Lady Boothroyd. Unless local authorities know precisely what is expected of them and the necessary finance is there, learning disabled people will be left to get on with the minimum support, as has been their unhappy lot throughout the centuries.
	Those in the House today may have heard of the widely reported case, documented by Channel 4 in January and referred to by David Lodge in his contribution to two most moving and thought-provoking articles about learning disability, which appeared in the Guardian on the Saturday following the death of Ivan Cameron. Perhaps I may quote the now deceased Lord Byron and,
	"lend fresh interest to a twice-told tale".
	This unbelievable story is of a family in Norfolk struggling to cope with the transfer of care from an NHS campus. The daughter, Tracy Butt, is 44 and has cerebral palsy and epilepsy. She cannot speak, has very limited understanding and must use a wheelchair to move. Her parents are in their sixties and have suffered ill health—the mother from cancer and the father undergoing a heart bypass operation. Recently, the Norfolk primary care trust told them that the bungalow where Tracy received residential care would be closed. The replacement was to be supported living; in effect a quick transition from full support to extremely limited support, expecting Tracy to cook and to use household appliances, even though such actions were clearly beyond her capabilities. The harsh reality is that her hard-pressed parents would have to fill those gaps. Their fight with social services goes on, as it does for more and more people moved from residential care without a realistic assessment of their complex needs.
	Enabling independence does not mean withdrawing help. It means supporting people to make their own decisions, to shop, to manage their money or to travel. Some people will need support with all aspects of daily life, including personal care. The vast majority of disabled-people support tends to be an essential part of independence.
	I am concerned that the Government are in denial about the scale of the problem. They need to carry out an urgent survey on the quantity and quality of provision being offered to disabled people seeking independent living. Much of this work has already been done for them by research carried out by others such as the Learning Disability Coalition. Its Tell It Like It Is report last year drew from surveys of people with a learning disability and their experiences of cuts in social care: 34 per cent had seen their daytime activities cut; and 37 per cent of people whose college courses were cut are now staying at home instead. There is further evidence of removals of employment services, transport services and respite care homes. So let us stop denying that there are cuts in services.
	Furthermore, a recent study by the Centre for Disability Research, commissioned by Mencap and the Learning Disability Coalition, suggests the social care needs of adults with learning disabilities will increase by up to 5.5 per cent per year from 2009 to 2026, compared with the Government's previous estimates of just 1 per cent growth. The reason for this includes a higher survival rate of babies with profound and multiple teaming disabilities. If this is not addressed, we will continue to see deteriorating levels of social care.
	As specified in the Bill, each local authority and NHS body must identify how many disabled persons are in its area, together with his or her needs, and plan support accordingly. Given the inadequate anticipation of disabled people's needs applying at present, this is clearly a necessary step. Personalisation done properly must identify the individual's needs and the necessary funding should then be calculated, rather than the current practice of cutting the cake into even thinner slices.
	The Bill proposes a fair and sensible approach to enforcing this, through the introduction of a national resource allocation framework, a move advocated by Mencap and others in the disability sector. Such a system should involve assessment of disabled people with the purpose of working out their entitlement to care. Entitlements set out in a national strategy will avoid the postcode lottery that sees unfairness for those with moderate learning disabilities who happen to live in the three quarters of councils which now support only those with substantial or critical needs. The resource allocation framework is the logical way of enforcing the principles of personalisation, this ensuring that both local authorities and central government understand the many challenges to be overcome before disabled people may truly experience independence.
	Also welcome in the Bill is the introduction of the duty to allocate an individual budget. In 2007, the Government stated in Putting People First that individual budgets should be implemented by 2013. But there is no sanction to ensure that this will happen unless it is enshrined in legislation, so that choice over social care is not limited to a minority. Perhaps the fear of individual budgets for government and local authorities is that they can no longer hide cuts in provision when that provision is given as a cash payment.
	So when the Minister responds, I hope that she will acknowledge that equal citizenship for disabled people, especially those with a learning disability—whom I have a particular reason to support—is still a long way off, and that the Government must increase funding to make independence and equality of opportunity a reality. We know that the Government are due to publish a social care Green Paper later in the year, and I trust it will be truly aspirational for all disabled people. At least it should recognise the many basic needs which are still required by disabled people who, if it were not for the tireless and often unrecognised support of their families, would be left to lead an unhappy, undignified and, for some, quite impossible life.

Baroness Wilkins: My Lords, I applaud my noble friend Lord Ashley for once again giving us the opportunity to press for legislative reform of the care and support framework. It took no fewer than 19 attempts over 10 years to ensure that disability discrimination legislation reached the statute books. I hope that we will not have to wait so long for the independent living Act, or something very similar to it.
	I have some reason for optimism. I hope it is justified. Since this Bill was first introduced to your Lordships' House in 2006, it has driven a range of positive developments in relation to independent living. The independent living strategy, published last year, was in large part a response to the Bill and the huge support it generated. This was very welcome. For the first time, we have a cross-government commitment to driving forward policies that take us closer to freedom, choice and control for all. I hope the Minister will be able to update us on progress in delivering the strategy and how disabled people will be involved in monitoring it and holding the Government to account.
	The Bill has also helped to bring Government to acknowledge that the care and support system is in need of radical reform, hence the Green Paper on social care reform that we eagerly await, and the Law Commission review of the legislative framework for adult social care. It has also intensified the demand and pressure for roll-out of individual budgets resulting in Putting People First, the transformation programme for adult social care, which is an attempt to galvanise local authorities into action in individualising funding and moving their systems towards delivering choice and control to disabled people. Two Bills currently before Parliament extend this approach, with the Health Bill providing for piloting personal health budgets and the Welfare Reform Bill piloting a right to control employment and related support funding. Pilots of individual budgets for disabled children and their families are also being pursued.
	Lifetime homes are another measure at the heart of the Bill and, again, this is an area where we have won significant gains. All social housing must meet the standards by 2011 and the private sector has until 2013 to deliver of its own volition or face regulations to force it to do so. So there is widespread acceptance of the need for reform and important steps being taken towards it and my noble friend Lord Ashley can take considerable credit for this.
	However, all these disparate initiatives seem to indicate a piecemeal approach to independent living. There is a danger that they may further fragment the response to disabled people's needs. Where is the joined-up thinking between individual budgets for personal care, the piloting of personal health budgets and the individual budgets for disabled children? How do they tie in with the right to control which forms part of the Welfare Reform Bill currently making its way through Parliament?
	None of these initiatives recognises the fundamental importance of advocacy to deliver independent living. Disabled people need a secure framework of local advocacy provision throughout the country to make a reality of choice and control. Advocacy services are crucial in ensuring that disabled people make choices for themselves—choices which might otherwise be made on their behalf by other people. Can the Minister tell the House whether the Government are making any firm progress in this area?
	Only legislation can deliver the fundamental transformation and reform required for independent living. That is why we continue to urge the Government to seize the opportunity presented by this Bill; for it is, and always has been, a golden opportunity to deliver the transformation that the Government have promised, and rectify the flaws in legislation which create barriers to human rights and independent living.
	As we have already heard, the Government need to consider the risk of leaving fundamental reform too late and not pursuing it vigorously enough. The Commission for Social Care Inspection's recent State of Social Care report warns that most people still experience a one-size-fits-all model of care that is not geared towards people's individual needs. Councils are at an early stage in transforming social care, and developments are patchy and vary between different groups of people. There are different understandings of—and levels of commitment to—personalisation by councils, partner agencies, people who use services and carers, as well as difficulties in extending pilot schemes. Those with multiple and complex needs continue to have little, if any, choice about their care. While the number on direct payments has grown, the number of people benefiting from individual budgets remains only 10,000—of whom a fifth live in Oldham, a pioneer in this field. This should be a signal that the time for pottering is over. We need to commit to reform or risk losing momentum and seeing personalisation poorly and patchily implemented.
	As we have already heard, another risk is the unacceptable strain that is placed on families affected by disability the longer that the current situation persists. Another recent CSCI report found that disabled parents and their children often receive fragmented and inadequate support. Few councils are achieving the right balance between supporting disabled parents and supporting children who help look after their disabled parents. Less than a third have developed any kind of joint protocol to clarify responsibilities within the council and with other partner agencies. We know all too well the costs of not supporting families. Look at the Disabled Persons (Independent Living) Bill, and you will find measures that would clarify disabled parents' support entitlements, end fragmentation and mandate the joint protocols required to meet the needs of families in a holistic way.
	More generally, there are hundreds of thousands of disabled and older people effectively abandoned by the social care system and abandoned by the health system too. What is their lot? They may be forced to rely on informal family care if they are lucky, but at huge social cost to themselves and to the carers forced to give up their jobs or their own mental and physical health. Deprived of practical support, thousands will see their dignity and independence slowly slip away until such time as their lives are at risk and costly acute care is the only option.
	We could end this hardship and deprivation by redirecting resources away from dependency services and bureaucracy into a support framework that boosts independence, employability, social mobility and participation, reaping major long-term economic benefits. We need to grasp the opportunity provided by the Bill. In a general election in one year's time, disabled and older people will deliver their verdict on their satisfaction with progress so far. More than 11 million people is an electorate worth wooing.
	I should like us to be in a position to demonstrate that fundamental transformation and delivery on independent living is an imminent reality rather than a distant dream.

Baroness Masham of Ilton: My Lords, it is my pleasure to pay tribute to the noble Lord, Lord Ashley of Stoke. He has worked tirelessly over the years in your Lordships' House and another place, campaigning on behalf of disabled people, and he has chaired the All-Party Parliamentary Disability Group for many years. I am pleased that he has so many supporters today.
	This is the third time that the noble Lord has introduced in your Lordships' House this Bill on independent living for disabled people. The Bill illustrates just how complicated and varied disability is. It may be difficult for the Bill to be successful at this time, but the noble Lord deserves a medal for perseverance. I thank him for raising yet again some of the needs of disabled people.
	There are many disabilities therefore there are many needs. Disability comes into so much of our legislation and it is important that it does not get left out. Only yesterday, when the Mayor of London announced that people ought to cross the road more quickly, I wondered whether he had thought about disabled people. So many people cannot race across roads when they are elderly or disabled, or elderly with a disability. This is one aspect of independent living. At the Millbank crossing near Parliament I can only just get halfway across the road before the green man starts flashing. My electric wheelchair only goes at four miles per hour. I hope that elderly and disabled people will be taken into consideration.
	Many people have been greatly shocked by the horrific treatment of children such as Baby P by local authority children's protection agencies. The Disabled Persons (Independent Living) Bill has much in it about assessments. With disability being so varied and complex, does the Minister think that the staff from social services departments and other staff who have responsibility for assessing disabled people have enough training and experience to make accurate assessments? I feel that the equipment and other needs of disabled people may be a postcode lottery. Some equipment may come under health and some under social services. These departments should co-operate to achieve the best quality outcome.
	Disabled people have to be proactive if they are to manage to find their way through the maze of red tape. Some people do not have the drive, energy and ability to do this. Yesterday, at a meeting of the Motor Neurone Disease Association, I met a charming man with MND. He had been told by someone from the Wheelchair Service that, as he had MND, it might not be worth getting a wheelchair for him. How demoralising and shocking that a trained member of staff had such an appalling attitude. He told me that he had bought himself a suitable wheelchair. The Wheelchair Service is known as a Cinderella service. There is great need for improvement. I was pleased that the Members of Parliament present were also shocked to hear this. I was the only Member of your Lordships' House at that meeting. To relieve breathing problems at night for sufferers of MND, which is often a serious problem, a non-invasive oxygen pump can be of immense help and can extend life. This need has been pointed out to the National Institute for Clinical Excellence, but its assessments of equipment can be very slow indeed. This is a simple, cheap way of improving life. I am convinced that there should be a fast-track system to obtain the equipment for those who suffer from motor neurone disease.
	The MND Association has written to the noble Lord, Lord Darzi of Denham, about this but has had no reply. I expect that the letter is sitting on a civil servant's desk. I should be very grateful if the noble Baroness, Lady Thornton, will look into this, as the noble Lord, Lord Darzi, is passionate about his report, High Quality Care for All. To achieve high-quality care for people with MND, one needs a fast track, with understanding, high-quality staff who know what needs to be provided without delay. I hope that the Minister will urgently look into this. I wonder how effective members of the Neurological Alliance consider the National Service Framework for Long-Term Conditions is. As some of the needs are so complex, there should be guidelines for staff and members who may need more awareness of how to make life better for many disabled people.
	One of the clauses in the Bill covers discharge from hospital. This is a very important aspect. I declare an interest as president of the Spinal Injuries Association. Many people with severe injuries have to stay many extra months in much needed hospital beds, costing the NHS a lot of money, as they do not have a suitable home to go to. At the spinal injury unit at Oswestry, a good system of houses is provided by Trans House, so that people can be discharged and stay, with help, waiting for their houses to be made ready for them, thus not blocking beds. This is a halfway-house system but it needs the co-operation of people working together in health, housing and social services. This housing in Oswestry is only a drop in the ocean.
	To make independent living better for disabled people, there should be communication and co-operation between statutory and voluntary organisations and service users' needs should be listened to. The existing legislation should be made to work better and disability ought to be put higher on the priority lists of PCTs and local authorities. I hope that Members of Parliament will support disabled people.

Lord Low of Dalston: My Lords, having not been able for one reason or another to support the noble Lord's Bill on any of its previous appearances in your Lordships' House, it gives me great pleasure to do so today. The noble Lord, Lord Ashley, is a figure of unique stature and unrivalled authority in the disability field and it is a particular pleasure to see him here today in such good form. As others have remarked, his persistence is admirable and what he has to say is rightly accorded the highest respect. Like the noble Baroness, Lady Wilkins, I hope that he will not have to wait as long as those who framed the disability discrimination legislation in the 1980s and 1990s for his ideas to be fully taken up and implemented by the Government.
	The first clause of the Bill states:
	"The purpose of this Act is to ensure that disabled persons enjoy the same choice, freedom, dignity, control and substantive opportunities as persons who are not disabled at home, at work, and as members of the community".
	It is hugely concerning that such a statement still needs to be made after the legislative achievements of the past few decades. The United Kingdom is widely hailed as having some of the most advanced anti-discrimination legislation in the world, yet here we are, having to assert once again that disabled people should enjoy the same rights and freedoms as everyone else.
	Is this really necessary? I fear it is and that, as has been movingly attested by other noble Lords, despite the achievements of the noble Lord, Lord Ashley, and other distinguished Members of this House, this Bill is correct in its analysis of the current situation and in its provisions to address that. However, we have to make the point not only that legislation is important, but that its full and complete implementation is absolutely critical if the rights which it contains are to be delivered.
	We have heard from other noble Lords about the importance of a national independent living strategy, the need for it to be properly resourced, and the role it can play in drawing together current provision and making new provision where none exists. Clause 4 calls for such a strategy to include an economic plan and a framework to deliver the strategy and, most importantly, to involve disabled people, their carers and advocates, the voluntary sector and professionals in the development of the strategy.
	Clause 5 places general and specific duties on the NHS and local authorities to promote independent living. The duties in Clauses 6 and 7 would make independent living a reality by obliging local authorities to meet the needs of disabled people by enabling their access to front-line services, personal budgets and employment. The NHS will also have to take greater steps to involve disabled people and provide an appropriate and sufficient range of services.
	We all know the importance of co-operation between agencies and organisations. I was pleased to hear the noble Lord, Lord Ashley, highlighting the importance of that in his presentation of the Bill. I am, therefore, particularly pleased that Clause 8 will support local authorities and the NHS in working together alongside key partners to promote independent living.
	One of the biggest challenges in supporting independent living is in identifying disabled people. It is perhaps a sign of the insufficient importance with which independent living and, in a wider sense, disability in general are regarded that so little relevant information is collected and maintained by the many arms of government. We often hear that we live in an information age. If that is true, what can explain the lack of information on the numbers of disabled people, their impairments and their needs? How can we provide services that meet the needs of disabled people if we do not have accurate information about them and their aspirations? They should be able to access education, employment and the full range of cultural and social opportunities available to non-disabled people? However, if disabled people are to be able to take advantage of such opportunities, what they want has to be identified, and public and private organisations need to include disabled people in their planning and operations. I am dismayed at how often in discussions with government and other organisations it is still necessary to point out that disability monitoring and data collection is an essential prerequisite to ensuring equality, inclusivity and access. This Bill should help to remedy some of these deficiencies.
	It is the question of accessibility that I know best and to which I wish to devote the rest of my remarks. Like many disabled people, I welcome the Disability Discrimination Act as a piece of legislation which creates obligations not to discriminate against disabled people, and places requirements on employers and service providers to make reasonable adjustments to meet their needs. Long lead times were set for organisations to comply, but many of them, most vexingly in the public sector—including the NHS, local government, schools, colleges and universities—fail to make their services fully accessible.
	The discussion of access all too often focuses on a rather narrow conception of it purely in terms of the physical environment. The difficulties caused by steps, poor paving, inadequate lighting, badly marked or badly delineated routes and pathways, narrow doorways and inaccessible washroom facilities are important issues; but access is not just a physical challenge or about negotiating physical barriers, it is about being able to access information and services independently—in some cases with personal support to increase independence.
	As a blind person, I read Braille; my notes here are in Braille. But, unfortunately, I cannot get a council tax bill, a doctor's appointment or a bus timetable in Braille. Young people in our schools cannot get text books in accessible formats. Benefit letters do not come in Braille, nor do letters with other personal, even medical, information. Even Bills published in this House are not readily accessible.
	The staff in my office recently approached 22 local authorities and asked in which accessible formats they could provide information for blind or partially sighted people. Only two out of 22—I repeat, only two—had frontline staff who knew the relevant information. Most local authorities could provide large-print versions of information on request, but more than a third did not provide Braille or audio versions for people who could not read print. In a society where we expect people to participate in the democratic process, be active citizens, use new technology to access services, not miss hospital appointments, succeed in education and gain employment, we still too often make it, in the words of the Disability Discrimination Act, "impossible or unreasonably difficult" to do so for people who cannot engage by the normal method of reading print.
	Making services and information accessible is a legal requirement under the DDA. Yet, the public sector still too often fails to meet these obligations. One solution, using the DDA, might be to take every public authority to court until they finally took their obligations seriously. The other solution is to embrace the provisions of this Bill to create a clear and unequivocal responsibility to make all information and services accessible to disabled people by whatever means necessary.
	I welcome this Bill and wish it well as it makes its way through your Lordships' House. I have an interest in this legislation, not only in my personal capacity but in my capacity as chairman of the Royal National Institute of Blind People. In both capacities, I offer the Bill my wholehearted support.

Lord Best: My Lords, like every noble Lord who has spoken, I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Ashley, on his tenacity in bringing forward this excellent Bill. I shall address one or two comments to Part 4, on housing and planning. I welcome all the measures proposed in that part, such as allocation of social housing, a disability housing service to match the needs of people with disabilities to the accommodation that may be available for them and proper assessment of the housing needs of disabled people. I shall concentrate on Clauses 33, 34 and 35, which are all about ensuring accessible and adaptable homes. That is an absolute fundamental, since people with disabilities spend a good deal of time in their homes, and the ability to move around freely within them is essential.
	I declare an interest as chairman of the Hanover Housing Group, which provides many thousands of homes for older people in particular, and also runs 15 care-and-repair local schemes that take advantage of the disabled facilities grants and adapt existing properties for better accessibility for those people with disabilities who live there.
	In the 1990s, the Joseph Rowntree Foundation and its housing trust experimented with the provision of more accessible homes. I was then the chief executive of that organisation, and we worked with a number of the leading disability organisations to hone and perfect standards that would ensure better accessibility and adaptability for the future and would make life easier not just for people with disabilities and mobility problems but for everyone. That includes young families for whom the buggy needs to come in through the front door without going up two horrible steps, and older people, for whom those same two steps can provide a dreadful barrier to getting in and out of a property, especially on an icy day. All those changes to standards of accommodation can make life so much better for everyone, if only the building industry would adopt them.
	Rowntree got to the point of an agreement across the piece with many disability organisations that a set of 16 lifetime homes standards would achieve that higher level of accessibility that would make such a difference. I was delighted when the then Minister for construction, Nick Raynsford, introduced changes to the building regulations, which were enshrined in the Building Regulations 2000, to ensure that every new home accorded with these better standards of space and accessibility within the home.
	Since that time, two results can be detected. One is a certain amount of cheating, we suspect, on the part of some house builders in the implementation of those building regulations. I greatly welcome in the Bill the concept of a really thorough-going review to ensure that building inspectors and builders are doing their jobs in actually meeting the standards that now are enshrined in building regulations.
	The other more positive change is that the Government have turned their minds—I commend the work of the noble Baroness, Lady Andrews, in taking hold of this—to taking the next step to a universal design standard that embraces all of those lifetime homes standards beyond those already accepted in the Building Regulations 2000. This really would be a helpful move. Yesterday, we heard from the noble Baroness, Lady Andrews, confirmation that the timetable is for all the housing association homes to meet these higher standards by 2011—which is not so very far away—and for the private sector house builders to follow in 2013. Those extra additions to the standards do not add anything significant to the cost, as long as they are part of the design at the outset. That is the key. If only builders would move away from their old pattern books and adopt the newer standards which incorporate accessibility and adaptability, it would not cost more than pennies at the outset.
	Achieving that change will be a dramatic improvement, but I detect in the air a move on the part of many house builders to take a step back rather than a step forward, on the grounds that the construction industry is in difficulty and that now is not the time to go for higher standards. I feel in the air a move to deregulate rather than have requirements for greater regulation of the standards of new homes. I ask the Minister and all other members of the Government involved in these matters to be resolute in not listening to the blandishments of those who think that a little bit of cost-cutting might now be permitted by the Government. We have to take the opportunity—now that land values have fallen so reducing the cost of production, and now that building costs have fallen—to improve on building standards, in particular standards of accessibility, not just to improve the lives of people with disabilities but to improve the lives of all citizens in a universal form. I leave that thought with the Minister.

Viscount Slim: My Lords, I thank noble Lords for allowing me to speak for a couple of minutes in the gap. I apologise for not being here at the start of this very important debate, but there were some traffic problems. I, too, thank the noble Lord for all the work that he has done to get this debate and the Bill in tune and starting to work. I very much support the Bill.
	Much of my life involves veterans' affairs. Therefore, I work with disability in all its forms. I do not see any mention of veterans in the Bill. It may not be much fun to be wounded, but it certainly is a very proud thing to be wounded for your country. Special mention should be made of these great men and women who are wounded, of whom there are many today. I remind noble Lords that veterans are not just very old men and women, like me. They can be an 18 year-old or 19 year-old with no legs or limbs, or they can be blinded. They can have many disabilities. As the noble Lord, Lord Low, so rightly said, it is extraordinary that you can walk into a local council or National Health Service hospital and ask how many patients are ex-military personnel with disabilities and there is usually a stunned silence. I should have thought that in Clauses 5, 6 and 10 there should be a duty on local government and the National Health Service, with all the problems that they have, to make special mention and special lists of disabled military personnel.
	I have suggested several times to various Ministers for veterans, who all do great jobs but who come and go with considerable frequency, that in local government there should be one council member who has responsibility for service disability. Even if the Government were not prepared to give an instruction on this, one hopes that they would make a suggestion and give every encouragement. Therefore, it is important to have somewhere in the Bill a couple of sentences or a small clause highlighting military disabled veterans, because once they leave the arms of the Ministry of Defence, they are thrown on the street and, unless we are careful—one has seen this on many occasions—they are forgotten and are very much left on the street. I ask Her Majesty's Government to do something really positive about that in the Bill.

Baroness Thomas of Winchester: My Lords, I, too, thank the noble Lord, Lord Ashley, for introducing this Bill for a third time and I thoroughly endorse all the warm words that have been said about him around the Chamber.
	We are discussing the Bill against the backdrop of the Government's Independent Living report, published a year ago, as mentioned by the noble Baroness, Lady Wilkins, which has the sub-title, "A cross-government strategy about independent living for disabled people". This is an admirable document—I am surprised that it has not been mentioned more—no doubt because of the predominance of disabled people who were on the expert panel supporting the review, chaired by the noble Baroness, Lady Campbell. However, I do not think that there has been a change in the Government's position, which presumably is that the Bill is not needed because the Government envisage this strategy being put in place over the next five years.
	So why are campaigners, such as the noble Baroness, Lady Campbell, and others, who have done so much to take this whole agenda forward, so sure that the Government need to legislate? Perhaps there is a clue in the number of times that the following phrase is found in the Government's strategy document:
	"We acknowledge that there is a gap between national policy and people's real experiences. This Strategy will begin to fill this gap".
	That is in the Executive Summary. Then, on page 21 under the heading "Consultation on implementation of the Strategy and the involvement of disabled people", we find point 15:
	"Disabled people have told us there is too big a gap between national policy aims and local implementation. They also told us that they should be involved in both the development and the implementation of policies which affect their lives and services which aim to meet their needs. We are consulting on how to do this".
	Finally, on page 93, point one is:
	"One of the clearest messages from disabled people during the course of the Independent Living Review has been that there is a significant gap between national policy aims and local implementation. In other words, the lived experiences of disabled people, (including older disabled people), are too often too far removed from the Government's vision and policy aims".
	That is why this Bill is needed, whatever the Government's vision and policy aims. There is a long way to go yet, and the noble Lord, Lord Rix, spoke about this very same point.
	Many Peers have spoken of the way that the system is not responding to the needs of disabled people. Seven out of 10 disabled people get support only if their needs are "critical or substantial", and no fewer than 80 per cent of councils plan to tighten eligibility criteria further this year, resulting in further cuts in support services for more disabled people. As for children's services, a staggering 77 per cent of families with severely disabled children report unmet needs for community equipment and help with basic personal services. Another horrifying statistic unearthed by Barnado's is that 175,000 children and young people have to provide daily care and support for disabled parents. No one should blame those parents for the work that their children have to do; it is the system that is letting them down.
	All these figures are likely to go up as the proportion of elderly and disabled people goes up relative to the population. Now is the time for disabled people to have their support safeguarded in a legislative framework, such as this Bill provides. As many others have mentioned, one of its most important provisions is that there would be a single assessment process for a person's individual budget to access joint funding streams. As RADAR says:
	"Pooled funds are required here as without them multiple assessments, delay and fragmentation would continue to be the norm and the full benefits of individual budgets would be hard to deliver".
	One of the most important provisions of the Bill is the right to advocacy, as the noble Baroness, Lady Campbell, said, or support from a nominated friend, together with community support and other forms of advice and assistance in relation to the assessment process. This is absolutely crucial, as it will enable disabled people to make considered decisions about how they want their support arranged and delivered.
	The Muscular Dystrophy Campaign, of which I declare an interest as a vice-president, recently conducted a patient survey in which it found that three out of four patients and their families have no access to a key worker or care co-ordinator and that they lack support and information, which are crucial in enabling a disabled person even to start looking at independent living. Under Clause 12, both these matters would be addressed. The survey also found that 60 per cent of patients rated their transition from childhood to adult services as either poor or very poor. Essential services, such as physiotherapy, are often immediately withdrawn for teenagers between the ages of 16 and 18, and the families then experience multiple assessments and a lack of forward-planning. This matter is directly addressed in the Bill under Clause 9, which states:
	"An independent living strategy prepared under this section shall also include ... specific measures to improve the transition between children's and adult services for disabled persons and to improve joint working between children's and adult services to support families affected by disability".
	I turn back to the survey, which found that 60 per cent of families are not satisfied with the amount and clarity of information available to them, while three out of four carers lack any respite support, and half of those with muscular dystrophy do not see a physiotherapist. All these matters are addressed in the Bill.
	Two other matters mentioned by respondents to the Muscular Dystrophy Campaign's survey are also mentioned in the Bill and are extremely important. They are, first, the portability of care packages, which would end the difficulties faced by people with complex needs, including those with muscle disease, when they move home and have to negotiate from scratch the support to which they are entitled. This is a particular problem with young people who want to go to university—a matter that I shall come back to in a moment.
	The second matter, which is vital in the Bill and resonates with all those who have mobility problems, is building standards. I endorse everything that the noble Lord, Lord Best, said in a most powerful contribution. Minimum accessible building standards will make a huge impact in reducing the need for major adaptations in homes, which can be very expensive, time-consuming and stressful for the families involved. I am amazed at how unstandardised basic facilities for disabled people are, such as disabled lavatories, particularly in hotels. In parenthesis, perhaps I may also rail against the lack of rails by steps in hotels, particularly hotels which have no ramp and no lift. Hotels sometimes blame English Heritage, but I am told by an architect friend that there is nearly always a way around this kind of access problem.
	Coming back to the difficulties that young people face when they are contemplating leaving home for the first time to go to university, I shall briefly tell the tale of a young man with Duchenne muscular dystrophy, whose experience shows why there is such a long way to go before an independent living strategy is truly in place. This young man, who lives in the Lake District with his parents, found the perfect university not far from his home, with a course which was just what he wanted. He started the ball rolling a year before he was due to start and found the inclusion team at the university very helpful. He held many meetings with his social worker, and care agency and all seemed to go well. But the people involved had simply not been listening to what the young man told them about the adaptations and the care that he needed, despite reassurances that they knew all about his condition. Nor had the university facilitators taken on board that they could not overload his timetable because of his need to rest. The final straw was the lack of enough funding from social services for all the care that the young man needed. In the end, he was not able to go to university and ended up back at home with his parents.
	That contrasts starkly with the experiences we hear about of young people with the same condition in Scandinavia, where independent living for disabled people is taken for granted and where many young people with severe disabilities are able to enjoy their time at university away from their parents with their peer group. In order to be even-handed, I will also report a more cheerful story in this country. A man in his 40s with spinal muscular atrophy type 2 spent more than 10 years trying to get out of a residential care home. He was going round in circles because, without a house, he could not apply for a care package or certain benefits and, without those care packages, he could not get a house. About five years ago, he finally succeeded. He is now very happy and managing well with a team of about six staff working around the clock.
	I do not propose to go through all the provisions of the Bill, tempting as that is. It is comprehensive in its coverage, for example, of the rights of those with mental health problems, the portability of support, and the importance of accessible housing, as I have already mentioned. Many important questions have been put to the Minister and I am sure we are all looking forward to her reply. One thing that worries me is that the Government are very good at the well intentioned language surrounding the whole world of disability but we must ensure that concrete, practical proposals are not buried under a huge superstructure of concepts, warm statements and catchy slogans, which sound wonderful but do not amount to a row of beans unless they really are carried through to practical implementation. I wish the Bill well and congratulate all those who have helped to draw it up.

Lord McColl of Dulwich: My Lords, I, too, congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Ashley of Stoke, on introducing this Bill. As many have said, he has a long and distinguished record of fighting for the rights of disabled people.
	On this side of the House, we support the main principles behind the legislation: first, that disabled persons are the best judges of their own requirements; secondly, that disabled people should be able to exercise choice, freedom and control; thirdly, that disabled children should be able to express their views freely in relation to all matters affecting them; fourthly, that independent living support should be arranged so that no disabled person is reliant on support from a child or young person which may impair their educational opportunities; and fifthly, that disabled children should be supported to express their views freely in relation to acts done or decisions made under the provisions in the Bill.
	The Conservative Party welcomes the opportunity that the Bill affords to discuss some very important issues and acknowledges the case for giving disabled people the right to access and develop services that would enable them to live as independently as possible. The party's disability agenda has seven key issues. The first is to help people with disabilities to lead independent lives so that they can be helped to exercise greater control over the care that they receive. The second is to recognise and support the role of carers. The third is tackling benefit dependency. The links between disability and poverty need to be fully understood. People with disabilities can benefit from work as much as non-disabled people and will be disadvantaged in the same way if they are unable to break out of the dependency trap. The fourth issue is benefit reform, which should be based on clear principles of accessibility, simplicity, fairness, avoiding means testing wherever possible, removing disincentives to work, and sufficient flexibility to be able to make practical distinctions between those able to work and those unable to do so. The fifth point is to safeguard special schools. Provision for special educational needs requires reform. Statementing—a word I do not like but which is here to stay—has become confrontational and bureaucratic. Special schools have been closed and parental choice has been reduced. Until those issues are addressed satisfactorily, the Government should not force local authorities to close special schools against the wishes of local people. The sixth point is to ensure equality of access to healthcare. That is critical to people with disabilities. The NHS must ensure that it attaches equal value to treating patients with and without disabilities. The seventh point is dealing with the stigma of mental health, which has already been mentioned. We believe that there is a need to recognise the particular problems of those with mental illness on benefits and the challenges that they face when seeking work.
	We are committed to introducing individual budgets so that people can take care of their own care needs. They will allow people to commission health and social care services jointly for themselves. Under such a system people would be granted full funding for their health needs and then be means-tested for their social care entitlement. Those budgets will especially help the millions of people with long-term conditions, who often feel that care is "done unto them", despite the fact that they often know much more about their condition than the clinicians. David Cameron has had firsthand experience of disability and knows all about the subject. He wants people with disabilities to have the same opportunities as everyone else.
	As many noble Lords have said, there is uneven provision of services for disabled people across the country. How do the Government intend to deal with that? There seems to be no system in place to cover a disabled person who moves to a different part of the country. They often have to start from scratch and renegotiate a new care package from a variety of different sources.
	There is a sense of déjà vu about this Bill because, 16 years ago, I introduced the precursor to this Bill, the Disability Persons (Services) (No. 2) Bill. I found Prime Minister Thatcher very supportive. She was always very concerned about respite care, emphasising what a great contribution carers made and how we should do much more to support them. Noble Lords may not be aware that it was the then Mrs Thatcher who emphasised the importance of disabled people by splitting the old Department of Health and Social Security into its two present component parts. As disabled people do not like being called "the disabled", she changed the Minister's title from "Minister for the Disabled" to "Minister for Disabled People". When I suggested that, she immediately said, "They will want to change all the notepaper", so it was agreed that they would have to use up the existing supply before printing new notepaper.
	I have always been immensely impressed by how much so many disabled people contribute to society. They enrich it and they are an inspiration to us all. A severely disabled girl, who had liver disease, rickets and renal failure, could not find a job when she left school, so we created a secretarial job for her in my department at Guy's Hospital. She soon proved to be one of the best secretaries we ever had. She never moaned; she never complained. She had to be dialysed three times a week, and she insisted on being dialysed at night so that she did not need to take any time off work. The effect on the rest of the department was very impressive indeed, because suddenly no one else took any time off work. How could they? Then, unfortunately, she started to go downhill. Sir Roy Calne in Cambridge gave her a kidney and liver transplant, which was an enormous success. She took on a new lease of life. She became ordained, and when she got up to preach, everyone listened to what Emma had to say; she knew what she was talking about. A few years later, she got married. What an amazing transformation.
	We have friends who adopted a Vietnamese boy of 10, who was born without eyes and thrown, literally, on to the rubbish dump soon after birth. He was rescued and taken to an orphanage, but was neglected there for many years. After he was adopted, he was surrounded by love and attention, and within two years this almost uncontrollable boy had improved so much that he could go skiing. There are many examples in this House of amazing cheerful triumphs over adversity: the noble Baronesses, Lady Campbell of Surbiton, Lady Wilkins, Lady Masham of Ilton and Lady Thomas of Winchester. What an inspiration they are to us. So many disabled people inspire us, too.
	If altruism is not enough to goad us into striving to improve the life of disabled people, perhaps a touch of realism might help. About half of us will be disabled to a greater or lesser extent before we die, so we need to declare an interest in more senses than one.

Baroness Thornton: My Lords, I thank my noble friend Lord Ashley for his passion and his determination to raise attention to this important issue. As ever, he has made a powerful case, and, as other noble Lords have noted, he has made an immense contribution over many years towards improving the life chances of disabled people, as have many noble Lords who have contributed to this debate today. They are a very powerful and convincing lobby on this issue.
	In introducing the Bill, my noble friend has provided your Lordships' House with another opportunity to debate the critical question of what independent living means for disabled people. This debate does not concern simply the public services that disabled people use; it reaches further. I echo the comments of other noble Lords when I say that our biggest challenge is to change the culture and attitudes that prevent inclusion and equality.
	Today, my job is to assure noble Lords that this Government continue to make progress in addressing this issue, and to put the case that this legislation is not needed. The challenge is huge, but the Government's programme of actions is making a real difference now and will continue to break down the barriers to equality. We have not stood still since the Bill last came before this House. We continue to drive forward a programme of real change to transform the lives of all disabled people and their families. We seek a fundamental shift in the relationship between disabled people and public services, which is why we are involving disabled people and many of their organisations in championing their causes and involving them more and more in the design of policy and commissioning of services.
	I shall briefly set out the main achievements of the Government so far and then address noble Lords' questions. I want to give the House an understanding of our action and ongoing commitment to deliver the equality, choice and control for disabled people for which the noble Lord is so notable an advocate. I am pleased to inform the House about recent progress on the United Nations convention on disability rights. As noble Lords will be aware, the Explanatory Memorandum and command paper for ratification were laid before Parliament on 3 March. Our ambition is to ratify this in the spring. In ratifying the convention, we are saying loud and clear that this Government are committed both to the convention and to the principle that disabled people have, and should be able to enjoy, the same human rights as everyone else. This shows that the Government are serious about achieving equality of human rights for disabled people and in making real progress towards their goal of disability equality by 2025.
	The noble Baroness, Lady Thomas, and others mentioned that, just over a year ago, the Government launched the independent living strategy, which aims to give disabled people greater choice and control over the support that they need to go about their daily lives and how it is provided. It is a commitment to a shared understanding of the principles and practices of independent living. It contains more than 50 commitments, many of which are challenging, involving as they do the need to change systems and attitudes. We are making progress in delivering the strategy, and we are committed to measuring and reporting on this annually. The work in progress includes: finding out how to encourage practitioners, including health, social care, housing and employment professionals, to adopt an independent living approach—this is very much reflected in my noble friend's Bill; creating a one-stop resource to assist practitioners and professionals with older people's independent living needs; and demonstrating new ways of working with independent advocacy and brokerage. I will deal with advocacy later.
	My noble friend Lady Wilkins pointed out that the Bill looks at care and support. We will publish the long anticipated care and support Green Paper this spring. This will be followed by a period of consultation. I note that many noble Lords were involved in the creation of the Green Paper and in the consultation on it prior to its publication. The consultation will give disabled people, others who use services, their families, the public and agencies that plan, commission and deliver the services the chance to respond to the reform options proposed in the Green Paper. I do not propose to go into details, but I assure noble Lords that portability, which the noble Baroness, Lady Campbell, and others in particular championed, will be addressed in the Green Paper. Since our discussions during consideration of the Health and Social Care Bill, I have continued to keep a watching brief on this issue, and I have not let it go. I had a meeting with my honourable friend Phil Hope, when he was appointed Minister, to press on him the importance of this issue particularly to Members of your Lordships' House.
	The Welfare Reform Bill, which is being discussed in another place next week and has been referred to by several noble Lords, introduces new legislation to increase choice and control for disabled people. They will have a greater say over how public resources are used to provide certain services and support. This right to control will be set out in a primary legislation framework that is less prescriptive than the Disabled Persons (Independent Living) Bill. It puts disabled people at the heart of the process and encourages a joined-up approach to improving services that will be co-produced with disabled people.
	Flexibility, consultation and co-production are some of the best features of the right to control, as the noble Baroness, Lady Campbell, so rightly pointed out. The Government want to encourage innovation and co-operation between individuals and the state. The right-to-control legislation provides this flexibility by setting out broad rights to deliver improved choice and control but allowing regulations to be consulted on and designed in co-production so that we can achieve the correct right for each service and the support that comes within its scope. This sort of tailoring recognises that disabled people are, indeed, the experts in their own lives. I will listen with interest to the discussions in your Lordships' House when this Bill reaches us in due course.
	In social care, last year's Putting People First sets the direction for adult social care for the next decade. It makes clear the need for greater collaboration to deliver on personalisation, signals the cross-sector consensus on the ambitions for the future, and commits all partners to working together to achieve significant change by April 2011 to enable people to retain their independence and exercise choice and control over the support that they need. Central to that transformation by 2011 is for individuals to access a personal budget. This is a clear understanding of how much is to be spent on their care or support. It allows people to exercise choice or control spending by taking a direct payment. By using an individual budget, individuals can bring a number of income streams together to create a more joined-up package of support. The Government have recently committed an extra £500 million to support councils in carrying out the radical transformation of services that is needed to improve choice and control, as outlined in the springboard report referred to by the noble Baroness, Lady Campbell.
	Let us not forget that for some specific groups of disabled people, the barriers to choice and control are even greater. That is why we published in January this year our new three-year cross-government strategy, Valuing People Now, to deliver real change for all people with learning disabilities. It sets out a vision where people with learning disabilities are people first, and an agenda for making transformation and equality happen for all people with learning disabilities and their families, including those with complex needs. The strategy emphasises especially the right to access high quality healthcare. It sets out measures on staff training, on annual health checks, health plans and improving the commissioning of services so that people with learning disabilities, who often have poorer health, can lead healthy, active and fulfilling lives.
	We have also launched the carers' strategy to better support the 6 million people who care for family members and friends. Equally, we must remember that many disabled people are carers themselves, and this strategy will address their needs, too. Evidence shows that the best way to enable carers to continue to care is by enabling them to take breaks from caring, and that is why we are giving councils £224 million to support carers in England through the carers' grant this year. In the three years up to March 2011, we will have given councils more than £1.7 billion to enable them to continue to develop innovative and personalised outcomes that reflect the needs of their local carer population.
	User-led organisations which are led and controlled by disabled people have a key role to play in delivering personalisation and independent living. That is why we are investing over £1.6 million over two years to support the development of up to 25 action and learning sites round the country to develop best practice and share experience with others. We will announce very shortly the sites of who will receive funding this year. There are many examples not just of the difficulties people face, but also really inspirational examples of creative approaches, such as the ways in which disabled people are using their personal budgets to open up new opportunities and take control of their lives. However, like my noble friend Lord Ashley and other noble Lords, I am under no illusion that we still have a fair way to go before all disabled people are empowered to participate fully in society as equal citizens. The Government do not need persuading; we are determined to deliver real change, not just in the lives of disabled people themselves, but in the way in which society reacts to disability.
	I turn now to some of the specific points raised by noble Lords. The noble Baroness, Lady Verma, my noble friend Lord Ashley and the noble Lord, Lord Best, all addressed the issue of housing, which forms part of the Bill. In February 2008, the Department for Communities and Local Government published Lifetime Homes, Lifetime Neighbours: A National Strategy for Housing in an Ageing Society. The strategy addresses the challenge of ageing and what it means for housing and planning, and the noble Lord, Lord Best, was quite right to commend my noble friend Lady Andrews on her work. DCLG has developed the Lifetime Home Standard, which will give a clear definition of the standards required in guidelines to be followed by designers. The Lifetime Home Standard will become mandatory at decreasing levels of the Code for Sustainable Homes over time. Adherence to lifetime standards will be mandatory for the whole of public sector funded housing by 2011. In addition, the Disabled Facilities Grant Programme is now helping around 38,000 disabled people each year by providing assistance with major housing adaptations. This will enable people to remain living independent lives in their own homes. This is a mandatory grant and local authorities receive an annual allocation without a specified requirement to match the funding.
	The noble Baronesses, Lady Verma and Lady Masham, both spoke about issues surrounding transport. The Department for Transport is working with local authorities to ensure that accessibility planning is reflected in local transport plans and local area agreements. We intend to keep a watching brief on this. In response to the remarks of the noble Baroness, Lady Masham, I hope that the Mayor of London has taken note of her plea concerning the needs of disabled people and London's roads. The noble Baroness, Lady Verma, and the noble Lord, Lord Low, also referred to the issue of access to public places, as did several other noble Lords. She will know that the Disability Discrimination Act requires local authorities, through the disability equality duty actively to promote disability equality, including access matters for disabled people. The duty includes making reasonable adjustments to meet the needs of disabled people. I agree absolutely with the noble Baroness and the noble Lord that there is still a long way to go as regards this issue.
	The noble Baroness, Lady Verma, and the noble Lord, Lord Rix, both raised the matter of personalised individual budgets, asking who is responsible for them, what checks would be made and various other issues. Putting People First was published in December 2007. Central to the transformation is giving individuals a personal budget and a clear understanding of how much should be spent on their care and support. Individuals have a choice whether to take up a personal budget or control it themselves by taking cash in lieu of services, in this case using a self-assessment process. The funding provided should be sufficient to meet the disabled person's assessed needs, including the costs associated with managing that budget. If the disabled person chooses, they do not have to manage directly their personal budget; rather, they can choose to receive a service that meets their individual assessed needs. This is about enabling people to choose the option that is best for them, while built into the system are measures of support and control.
	The noble Baronesses, Lady Campbell and Lady Thomas, my noble friend Lady Wilkins and other noble Lords stressed the importance of advocacy; I absolutely agree with them. The cross-government concordat Putting People First sets out a goal of universal information, advice and advocacy services for disabled people, and we expect to make significant progress towards this goal by 2011. We are investing £520 million over the next three years to deliver this transformation, including advocacy services. My noble friend Lady Wilkins was right to remind us of how many people are in fact disabled, and who will reflect their assessment of the success or otherwise of this Government's delivery of services when they decide how to vote in forthcoming elections. She also raised the issue of the alignment of community care with the right to control. We will test the alignment of right to control services and support with community care in the trailblazing authorities and report the outcome to Parliament. Community care legislation already includes a duty on local authorities to make direct payments, with powers to direct them. We would not want to duplicate or cause confusion with the existing powers in the Welfare Reform Bill.
	My noble friend also referred to individual budgets. As I have already mentioned, we are piloting these budgets and looking at how they will work. My noble friend and the noble Baroness, Lady Thomas, also asked about progress on the independent living strategy and how disabled people will be involved in its implementation and monitoring. As noble Lords know, it was published in March 2008 and contains a commitment to monitor and report on progress on an ongoing basis. The annual report of the Office for Disability Issues, published in December 2008, contains data on the progress of the ILS and will form a baseline from which progress will be measured. Following a consultation on how best to involve disabled people in the implementation and monitoring of the ILS, the Government published their paper in November 2008, which sets out what we will be doing on the Independent Living Scrutiny Group. The group is made up of disabled people who will be involved and very influential in this issue. The right reverend Prelate rightly asked whether the money will be available. The figures I have given are assured and we intend to continue to commit towards these issues; there is no question of taking the foot off the pedal.
	The noble Lord, Lord Rix, raised the issue of the closure of communities. I was expecting someone to raise the question asked by the noble Baroness, Lady Boothroyd, on Tuesday. I think we may need to address this matter in a longer debate. When I was listening to that question, I was thinking that we need a longer discussion about how enabling people to be independent does not mean withdrawing support. It is not for me to say what your Lordships' House should be discussing, but it seems to me that this matter merits a longer discussion and a longer explanation of what the Government are undertaking in this area. The noble Lord also raised the Learning Disability Coalition report Tell it like it is. In the light of Putting People First and concerns about eligibility criteria, the Government are committed to carrying out a review of fair access to care. I have discussed that in your Lordships' House in the past.
	The noble Baroness, Lady Masham, raised an issue about motor neurone disease and the letter. I undertake to deal with that. Officials have already arranged to meet the MND Association in next few weeks to discuss its concerns. Work is under way to discuss what we can achieve in relation to wheelchair services and this issue. The noble Baroness has only to speak and we listen very carefully to what she has to say about these things.
	The noble Lord, Lord Low, is right that the UK has some of the most advanced and sympathetic legal and public policy frameworks for disabled people in the world. However, we are not complacent. We are glad to recognise where progress has been made, but we know there is a great deal more to do.
	The noble Viscount, Lord Slim, drew our attention to the needs of our military wounded and disabled. I think that my noble friend can anticipate an amendment from the noble Viscount as the Bill progresses through your Lordships' House.
	The noble Baroness, Lady Thomas, rightly pointed to the gap between national policy and local delivery. It is a matter of continuing discussion, debate, legislation, allocation of resources and regulation. Indeed, it is the bread and butter of trying to make these policies work. The noble Baroness also pointed to the problems faced by disabled people in the transitions in their lives, and I agree that that is right. I think she may have been slightly unfair, but I hope the Government have put their money where their mouth is on these issues.
	I am very pleased to welcome the Conservative Party's agenda for the disabled and am happy that it has joined us in giving it such priority. I hope that Conservatives in local government will join us in trying to deliver it at local level too. I make the point that the Government are not forcing any local authority to close special schools. This is an issue that we have discussed before in your Lordships' House. We are committed to having the most appropriate care and location for each person.
	I suggest that the work that the Government are leading, which I have briefly outlined, means that the goals that we all desire can be delivered without recourse to this legislation. I thank noble Lords for a truly inspiring debate. I shall finish by saying that one of the reasons we are not convinced of the need for legislation of this nature is that we are preparing to introduce a new Bill—the equality Bill—in the spring. It will streamline the law and will distil nine pieces of legislation into a single Act. It will support our wider work to promote equality. I thank my noble friend and I hope that I have reassured him on the progress that we have made since the last time.

Lord Ashley of Stoke: My Lords, this is a difficult debate to respond to because a thousand points have been raised. They were diverse, but they had the same purpose: to support the Bill. I shall be brief. The politics of this debate stand out clearly. This is one subject on which we should never try to make party-political capital. That is important but, inevitably, whatever the Government in power, it is the nature of the case that they will be attacked. If a Tory Government ever come in again, they will be attacked in same way that the Labour Government have been attacked.
	I do not want the Minister to think that we do not appreciate what has been done. A lot has been done. We are saying that it is not enough and not quick enough and that we mean business. We are determined to press these points one way or another in this House and in the other place. Support for the Bill is unanimous. Noble Lords on all sides of the House think we do not go far enough, and it is possible that we do not. It is important to recognise what has been done, but it is more important to recognise what needs to be done, which is why we hammer away at this. I am well aware of the experience David Cameron and Gordon Brown have with disability, so no one has any illusions about their lack of knowledge or understanding.
	This debate has shown the fantastic expertise of the All-Party Group on Disability. It is remarkable that all the personal experience came through in this debate. I was very impressed by it, and I hope the Government will also be impressed. I shall leave it there. I will go through Hansard to deal all these points as best I can. The noble Viscount, Lord Slim, may rest assured that we will take on board his concerns. Either he can table an amendment, or we can, to deal with disabled ex-servicemen because they tend to be getting to the end of their lives now and there will be less pressure to look after disabled ex-servicemen. It would do a great deal for the Bill to insert something along the lines of the clause the noble Viscount mentioned.
	I thank all noble Lords who spoke in the debate. It has been a wonderful experience.
	Bill read a second time and committed to a Committee of the Whole House.

Cohabitation Bill [HL]
	 — 
	Second Reading

Moved by Lord Lester of Herne Hill
	That the Bill be read a second time.

Lord Lester of Herne Hill: My Lords, I am delighted that the Attorney-General will reply to the debate although the Bill is not her direct responsibility. Before she joined the Government, the noble and learned Baroness had a distinguished practice at the Bar, specialising in family and children's law, and therefore has great knowledge of the problems that the Bill is designed to address. She may recall that during the passage of the then Civil Partnership Bill, I pressed for cohabiting couples to be included, as they had been in my Private Member's Bill. The noble and learned Baroness expressed sympathy but explained why it fell outside the scope of that Bill. As a result, the issue was referred by the Government to the Law Commission, on whose report the Bill is largely based. I am grateful to the Attorney-General and Ministry of Justice officials for meeting us to discuss the Bill, and I look forward to meeting the noble Lord, Lord Bach, on his return, as he is the Minister with responsibility for the matter in this House.
	It is a principal aim of family law to protect the most vulnerable family members when relationships end. In one important respect, our family law fails to do so. Cohabiting couples—families made up of two adults living together in a loving relationship—are not recognised under English law as a family when their relationship breaks down, but rather are treated as two unconnected individuals. The division of their property is based on any agreements that exist and financial contributions made. The courts can take no account of what contributions each party made to the relationship by caring for the family or home, or sacrificing a career in the interests of the other party. Nor can English courts consider the needs of either party. Unless couples have taken steps to agree their legal position during their relationship, which is very unusual, the outcome under English property and trust law often bears no relation to what most people would agree would be a fair outcome for both parties.
	As a result, many adults and their children are left in poverty at the end of a cohabiting relationship. Unless a scheme is put in place which allows a fair arrangement to be reached between former partners, the burden of providing for them will continue to fall on the state and the taxpayer.
	The social problems with which this Bill is concerned are well illustrated by the case of Burns v Burns, where a couple had lived together for 19 years, had two children and had pooled their resources. When their relationship broke down, Mrs Burns discovered that she was entitled to nothing. She was not entitled to an interest in their home because they did not own it jointly. Because she was not married, the court could not consider what she might reasonably need or expect.
	The Burns case was decided more than 25 years ago. In spite of an enormous increase since then in the number of cohabiting couples, the outcome would be virtually unchanged if the case were to reach the courts today. English family law has not kept pace with developments in society, and only Parliament can come to the rescue.
	In their evidence paper, Families in Britain, published in December, the Cabinet Office and Department for Children, Schools and Families wrote these wise words:
	"we see an increasing range of family structures, to the extent that there is arguably no longer a one size fits all family in Britain today. But this is diversity and not decline. Warm, loving and stable relationships matter more for our happiness and wellbeing than the legal form of a relationship. And while marriage will remain of central importance, the reality in many people's everyday lives is that more and more families experience a range of family forms throughout their life time. There is no single family form that guarantees happiness or success".
	As the Government recognise, society is increasingly made up of non-traditional family units. The Government responded positively and creatively to the needs of non-traditional families by introducing the Civil Partnership Bill in response to my Private Member's Bill, and in reworking—with, if I may say so, great help politically from the noble Baroness, Lady Morgan of Huyton, whom I am delighted to see in her place—my Forced Marriage (Civil Protection) Bill. I hope that they will be able to do so again by supporting and where necessary improving this Bill.
	I am grateful to Stephanie Grundy, who has once more skilfully drafted a Bill for me, and I am especially indebted to Resolution, an association of 5,500 family lawyers, for its work on this Bill for more than a year, and for bringing to life the problems that it seeks to address. Resolution's members are frequently faced with clients who, having just come out of a cohabiting relationship, have been left destitute because of a lack of protection under the current law.
	Recent research showed that a third of children live in poverty. Children's financial well-being is dependent on that of their parents. The risk of poverty is exacerbated for children of separating cohabitants because of the current lack of financial protection for dependent partners. As 44 per cent of all children in England and Wales are born to unmarried partners, one important way for the Government to reach their target to alleviate child poverty is to tackle the situation of their unmarried parents. Gingerbread, the charity for single-parent families, told us:
	"Our own experience in assisting single parents has left us in no doubt that the current law is uncertain, complex and frequently produces unfair outcomes, particularly where a couple have had children. We consider that the case for reform is overwhelming".
	The Bill has authoritative support. It is largely based on the report of the Law Commission for England and Wales, which was the product of two years' work and a published consultation. Before publishing this Bill, we too conducted a public consultation. There were 197 responses, including from the Law Society of England and Wales, the Law Society of Scotland, the Family Division of the High Court, the Family Law Bar Association, the Association of Women Solicitors, Families Need Fathers, Refuge, Rights of Women, Stonewall, many academic experts, and individual family solicitors, all of whom supported reform. I have placed the results of that consultation in the Library.
	The Bill has broad public support. The 2008 British Social Attitudes report stated that almost nine in 10 people think that a cohabiting partner should have a right to financial provision on separation if the relationship has been long term, and includes children, or has involved giving priority to one partner's career over the other's.
	Mary Creagh MP, the admirable Labour MP for Wakefield, is a strong supporter of the Bill and has agreed to be its midwife in the other place, drawing on her experience of the problems faced by her constituents. Several Members of this House who cannot be here today have written to express their support, including the noble Baronesses, Lady Howe of Idlicote, Lady Stern, Lady Buscombe and Lady Flather, the noble Lord, Lord Pannick, and my noble friends Lord Wallace of Tankerness and Lord Goodhart.
	I also greatly welcome the support of the Southall Black Sisters. They believe that the Bill will have particularly important implications for women of ethnic minorities, especially Muslim women. It will address the problem of those women who, having been party to a religious wedding ceremony, believe that they have the civil rights of a married person. It is only when their relationship breaks up that they find that their marriage was never registered and that they have no rights. The Bill would also deter men from having polygamous marriages, which are illegal under English law.
	Since we launched the Living Together campaign in July, my office has been inundated with letters and e-mails from individuals who have been adversely affected by cohabitants' lack of rights. One former cohabitant told us:
	"By the time I realised I had no rights, I was in too deep—I had sold my house and given up my job to support my ex, by taking care of our children and helping out with his business. When I found out we were not common law husband and wife as I had assumed, I pressed for us to marry—to no avail. Since our split I have had to rely on government handouts and support from family whilst I try and rebuild my career and my new life as a single parent. I suppose the error I made was in trusting someone I loved".
	We all want to encourage stable and committed relationships. Some suggest that by validating cohabiting relationships the Bill would undermine marriage. On the contrary, reform would remove the current incentive to cohabit to avoid the financial implications of divorce. Cohabitation rates are rising and marriage rates are falling, and research indicates that this trend will continue, whether or not the law changes. This is happening in the context of the current law, which denies cohabiting couples legal rights and protection.
	Other Commonwealth countries give similar protection to cohabiting couples, including Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and Trinidad and Tobago. The Family Law (Scotland) Act 2006 updated Scottish law to introduce new rights for cohabitants. It is not identical to the scheme in the Bill. For example, the Scottish scheme does not define who is a cohabitant, leaving it to be decided by the courts; and it contains no opt-out scheme. Few cases have come to court, but statistics produced by the General Register Office for Scotland indicate that the legislation has had little effect on the number of marriages in Scotland. It would be wrong to postpone legislating for England and Wales under a different scheme.
	I am strongly in favour of marriage and am blessed in having been married for some 37 years to a loving and caring wife. She said this morning that she thought it was 38 years or even longer—poor woman. In those countries which give legal protection to cohabiting couples and their children, there is no evidence of any resulting decline in marriage rates. People marry for religious, social and emotional reasons, and these personal choices will remain unaffected.
	The Bill does not grant the same rights to cohabiting couples as those enjoyed by married couples and couples in civil partnerships. Cohabiting couples will not benefit from tax and pensions advantages unless they marry or enter into a civil partnership. The Bill maintains several important distinctions between how a court must deal with an application for financial relief on the breakdown of a cohabiting relationship and how it would deal with an application upon divorce. There would therefore remain considerable practical advantages to a couple deciding to marry or enter into a civil partnership. In this way the special place of marriage and civil partnership in our society is maintained.
	The Explanatory Notes are available in the Printed Paper Office. I shall therefore be brief in describing the Bill's contents. It gives cohabiting couples limited rights to make a claim for financial provision at the end of their relationship, through either separation or death. Part 1 determines to whom the Bill applies. It will not affect all cohabitants, but is limited to those who have demonstrated significant commitment to each other, either by having lived together for two years or by having had a child together. Two years was the period most strongly supported in our consultation, is consistent with other legislation, which grants rights to cohabitants after two years of living together, and with the Law Commission's recommendations, which suggested a minimum period of between two and five years. There is of course room for debate as to the appropriate period during which a couple must live together before they incur rights and responsibilities under the scheme. The period chosen determines eligibility to be within the scheme.
	The mere fact of coming within the scheme would not mean that the court would make financial provision. It would take into account the period of cohabitation in deciding whether to make an award. Where this was very short, the court would be unlikely to do so, unless there were other highly persuasive circumstances, such as a significant financial contribution by one party to the other. However, we will attend carefully to the views of noble Lords as to whether we have got the balance right or whether a longer period would strike a fairer balance. In other words, on this we are agnostic as always, seeking to achieve a Bill which the Government, who are the masters, can support.
	Part 2 gives former cohabitants the right to apply to a court for an order when their relationship breaks down. The court may make an order if it considers it just and equitable to do so, having regard to all the circumstances. This is not the approach recommended by the Law Commission, which advocated a system of compensation for economic disadvantage suffered as a result of the relationship. In the experience of the practitioners who advised me, the model in the Bill is preferable because it allows for all the circumstances of an individual case to be considered, including any economic advantage gained or disadvantage suffered, together with factors such as the needs of the parties and their children, and the commitment or lack of commitment between the parties. A compensation scheme fails to recognise the modern family and encourage social responsibility, which this Bill is designed to achieve. That model assumes you can live with someone for decades without taking on responsibility for those with whom you live. No one is better able to tell us about this than the noble and learned Baroness, Lady Butler-Sloss, a speaker in this debate. Family lawyers and courts are familiar with a discretionary approach, which enables the courts to tailor awards to deal with a wide range of very different family situations.
	Part 2 also contains provisions allowing couples to opt out, so that the rights contained in the Bill would not apply to their relationship. This maintains the essential freedom of personal choice, allowing couples to regulate their own affairs in accordance with their wishes.
	Part 3 allows cohabitants to take out life insurance in respect of each other's life and to register each other's death. Surviving cohabitants already have the right to make claims against their deceased cohabitant's estate. This Bill amends the definition of cohabitant in existing legislation to cover cohabitants who have children together. It also extends to cohabitants the right to claim for bereavement damages. I commend the Bill to the House.

Baroness Turner of Camden: My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Lester, for introducing this Bill and for his detailed explanation. I believe it to be very necessary. Increasing numbers of people now cohabit. More than one-third of people have cohabited in the past, as did I many years ago, although we later married. About 11 per cent of people cohabit today. Marriage rates are falling but cohabitation is increasing and many such couples have children. But current law gives such couples no rights if the relationship terminates. They are treated as unrelated individuals, which means that many women and children fall into poverty at the end of a relationship.
	Many people in such relationships do not realise that that could occur. They think that there is such a thing as common law marriage, but there is not. The Bill is an attempt to provide protection for vulnerable people, and our law should evolve to meet the needs of a changing society. As we have heard from the noble Lord, Lord Lester, there is evidence of strong support for such a Bill. Many people believe that a cohabiting partner should have a right to financial provision if the relationship has been long-term, includes children or has involved prioritising one partner's career over the other's career. There could also be a situation in which one partner had been the carer of the other.
	The Bill will not undermine marriage or civil partnership. It has not done so in countries such as Australia where similar legislation has been introduced. But it will provide some financial protection for otherwise vulnerable people. The courts will be able to make a financial award only if it is fair, thus making sure that the welfare of children is given priority. That could include child care costs to enable a primary-carer parent to work. There would also be new rights for the surviving partner in the event of the death of the other. The couple would have had to have lived with each other for a minimum of two years or have a child together. There would also be a right to opt out after appropriate legal advice.
	As we have heard, the Family Law Bar Association is in favour of this Bill. It categorically states:
	"The law as it currently operates is not only unable to provide fair solutions for cohabitants at the end of their relationship but also lacks coherence, can be unpredictable and is expensive to operate, thus further reinforcing the difficulties faced by economically weaker cohabitants when their relationships fail".
	This is humane and worthwhile legislation which I urge the House to support.

Baroness Deech: My Lords, I have been writing about and studying this topic for more than 30 years and I welcome the chance to address the realities of the issue. This Bill, I have concluded, is wrong in principle and in practice and could damage the prospects of those it wishes to assist. In sum, cohabitation law retards the progress of women, disrespects the relationship, is a recipe for instability, takes away choice, is too expensive and extends an already unsatisfactory maintenance law to another large category. It will certainly be a charter for the footballer's girlfriend but not for the ordinary working woman.
	My issue of principle is one of human rights. The convention grants respect for private life, which is denied by the way in which this Bill would impose a complex legal structure on people who have avoided being bound. There is a human right not to be treated as married; not to be forced into a legal structure.
	The issue of practice is the complexity and unfocused nature of the assessment and eligibility criteria. At a time when legal aid in family law cases is being cut, so that child abuse cases and ancillary relief will be damaged, and the entire family law Bar is protesting about this, how can it be contemplated that more legal aid resources will be made available for cases involving very little money and a great deal of ill will? No doubt practitioners who are unable to continue with legal aid work will turn to private practice in the few cohabitation cases where there is something worth fighting over.
	Your Lordships will know that the Law Commission recommended a law for cohabitants, but that proposal awaits the completion of further research on how it has worked in Scotland. This Bill, however, is not the Law Commission one; it is far wider. Clause 9 lists, for the purposes of assessment of the orders that might be made, every single issue that might be relevant, basing itself largely on Section 25 of the Matrimonial Causes Act. It is, if anything, even broader. It will direct the court to test the degree of commitment of the couple. Research tells us that cohabitants have different perceptions about their commitment to each other. In particular, the man normally does not accept commitment until he has made a clear decision about their future together, whereas the woman will see it in her moving in. I could illustrate the same points of difference about every subsection.
	Suffice it to say that in other jurisdictions these cohabitation laws have been criticised for forcing a retrospective look at something that is over, something that has no one meaning for couples and, according to a leading American textbook, often leads to fraud and uncertainty. In the US, the number of states legislating for "common law marriage" has fallen back from two-thirds to 12 because of the difficulty. However, the American approach is at least based on a freely chosen contract between two people, not an imposed legal structure.
	There is no ceiling in the Bill on the amount that might be awarded. On the one hand, it might exceed half of the relevant assets; on the other, it might ignore the actual contribution made by one of the parties to the purchase of property, overriding trusts law. There is no clear direction in the Bill to the courts as to what the scheme is intended to achieve. Clause 1 mentions basic protection, but the lack of structure leaves the outcome wide open. This will be even worse in practice than the finding and applying of principles for matrimonial division of assets, which is notoriously difficult and expensive.
	Your Lordships may be aware that case after case of asset splitting on divorce has reached your Lordships' House in the forlorn hope of settling the principles once and for all. The experienced family judge, Lord Justice Thorpe, has said that the judges deplore the lack of clear rules and principles in this field. The judgments have not produced greater certainty or predictability and it is the lawyers rather than the litigants who are the principal beneficiaries of these decisions. There are enormous and disproportionate costs in contested applications—for example, the case of Piglowska, where the costs exceeded the assets—and the law for wives is strongly marked by paternalism because the judges have moved away from the principles of the statute law.
	So this is the wrong law to apply to a fresh set of applicants, and the drafting in the Bill gives nothing but confused messages. Experience has taught us that phrases such as "self-supporting" or "reasonable needs" are ignored once the antagonists set to. The question of why one adult should support another after their relationship has ended is so controversial that the Government shied away from it by not bringing into force a divorce reform Act in 1996. Do we really want a law where the mistress of a rich man may get £5 million after three years of childless cohabitation, mirroring what happened in the Miller case? While most cohabitants have very little, must their assets be wasted while the courts argue about the principles to be applied?
	According to government statistics, the average duration of a cohabitation is two years before ending or going on to marriage, and cohabitants are less likely to pool their assets than are the married. Every new law, it is said, gives 10 good years of work to lawyers; this one will certainly be a bonanza for them. Incidentally, it is the lawyers' group Resolution—formerly known as the Solicitors Family Law Association—that is behind it. Even the opt-out provision in the Bill is too complicated, requiring separate, and no doubt expensive, legal advice for each party. One can readily foresee the growth in cases where there is a dispute about whether a couple lived together as such, whether it was two years, whether they opted out, what the degree of commitment was, and their relative needs.
	English law in this field needs to be brought into line with those jurisdictions where adults are treated as such and, indeed, encouraged to make binding prenuptial and postnuptial contracts. If these were added to the already existing law which gives cohabitants their remedies it would be clear that there is no need to change the law. Cohabitants have the law of trusts where they have jointly contributed to property, which is generously interpreted, and child support is governed by Schedule 1 to the Children Act 1989.
	The issues of rights and freedoms are even more compelling against this proposal. Professor Cretney, a former law commissioner, has written that it is hard to understand why those cohabitants who express distaste for marriage and all its legal trappings should want the benefits of a comparable legal regime, with all the financial and emotional costs of litigation, and that it is possible that the scheme will become the instrument of exploitation and harassment. It is difficult to understand what the hardship is in living with someone else and being kept or sharing costs in that period. While the courts may eventually throw out a claim, behind that will be the many cases where one undeserving party gets money from the other by threat of going to court. The greatest awards will go to women who have lived with rich men and done the least work, while the ordinary, possibly deserving, will secure nothing except legal bills.
	Childbearing has not been found to be an indication of longer stability in cohabitation. Only 35 per cent of children born to cohabiting couples will live with both parents until they are 16, according to Ermisch. That is the same in the US and in Europe. Yesterday the noble Lord, Lord Laming, reported how much children need both parents. In the UK, cohabitants with children are less likely than those in other jurisdictions to marry.
	It is already said to be the case that men are deterred from marriage by the high cost of divorce. One can readily see that they will be deterred from commitment—from sticking around at all—by the cost of cohabitation, or that they will leave the union shortly before the magic two-year limit is reached. In sum, it is illiberal to impose on couples an intrusive contractual obligation not freely entered into, and it will encourage inherently more unstable relationships.
	I am, however, not putting out a moral message; far from it. The message is one of freedom of choice and respect for rights. Why should we make them pay when young educated people live together, or when a young woman with a good career is deserted by the young man who she had hoped would marry her but instead demands money from her? What are the expectations? Whatever they are, cohabitants know that they are not married, and they have chosen to avoid it. There is nothing to stop them marrying, for divorce is easily enough obtained if one is already married. If they are dissatisfied, why not marry in order to obtain marital rights? Couples may be trying out their relationship before marriage, and we should not impose the penalties of a failed marriage on those who were experimenting in order to avoid this outcome. There should be a corner of freedom where couples may escape family law, with all its difficulties. Cohabitation is not marriage, now or historically, and people need the freedom to try alternative forms of relationship, not to have one imposed on them, especially one that treats women as perpetual dependants.
	We are inconsistent. On the one hand we hear that women should expect half of all top jobs and equal salaries; on the other, we hear that a woman's job is to stay home and that, whether she has children or not, living as part of a couple is somehow damaging to her career prospects and she should be compensated for merely sharing her life for a while with a man. As long as the law treats women as dependants who have to be kept, that is an obstacle to equal treatment at work. It is a free choice whether or not to stay at home and care for children, and we all have to do housework whether single or cohabiting. "Giving up a career" is, in most cases, a myth; most people abandon it with a sigh of relief for something more enjoyable.
	What message will the Bill give to young girls contemplating further education when the law gives huge handouts to women who have been fortunate enough to live with a rich man for a short time while others, equally deserving, will get nothing at the end of a relationship because there is nothing available to be shared? Our law labels women as worth what their man is worth, once and for all. Nothing is more incomprehensible to the reluctant payer than maintenance, which is based not on morality or guilt or desert but simply on what he is worth.
	Maintenance principles have not been reformed by Parliament for decades and have floundered ever since no-fault divorce was introduced in 1969. We are now in a society where the majority of women, even with children, work or are expected by the Government to work; where they claim equal pay and opportunities; where they have contraception; and where more women enter higher education than men. The message given by the Bill, however, is that finding a well off man is an alternative career to one in the marketplace. It will be a bonus for the companions of the rich, and a delusion for those who live with a poor man.
	In sum, the Bill would be a windfall for lawyers but for no one else except the gold-digger. It would be bad for Bridget Jones; bad for commitment, stability and children; and a breach of the right to private life and the freedom to marry or not. It would produce cases of expense and uncertainty and create another class of people who just missed out on eligibility, whether because they were sisters or had not lived together for long enough. It would rarely produce sufficient assets, except in the wealthiest of cases. It would open the door to more nastiness and harassment at the end of relationships.
	The law in this field is already satisfactory, and all we need to do is encourage couples to set out their wishes in a contract. I hope that the Bill never reaches the statute book.

The Lord Bishop of Winchester: My Lords, I congratulate the noble Lord on his persevering industry, and that of the Odysseus Trust and Resolution, in bringing forward yet again a substantial Bill in the hope of pioneering a path which he may persuade the Government to follow.
	In February 2004 the General Synod of the Church of England passed the following two-part motion:
	"That this Synod ... a) strongly reaffirm that marriage is central to the stability and health of human society and warrants a unique place in the law of this country; b) recognises that there are issues of hardship and vulnerability for people whose relationships are not based on marriage which need to be addressed by the creation of new legal rights".
	It is these issues of hardship and vulnerability of people to whom they are real which, I confess, I did not hear attention given in the speech of the noble Baroness, Lady Deech, just now. It is a privilege as ever to follow her, and today it has been a particularly interesting experience to do so. I shall not try to take up her points one by one, not least because the noble Lord, Lord Lester, is much more qualified than me to do so. However, I anticipate that he may pay particular attention to Clause 8(3) in his Bill, which seems to undermine a number of sentences in the noble Baroness's speech.
	I voted for that motion in the Synod in February 2004 and I am therefore here today as a welcoming, yet critical, friend to the noble Lord's Bill. Only time will tell whether he thinks I am more the one than the other. I share to a considerable extent the concerns of those who fear that any Bill of this kind will undermine the fundamentally important institution, the "honourable estate", of marriage. I guess that, like the noble Lord, I should declare an interest, having been most gratefully married for a few years longer, I hear, than he has. Marriage is important not only for married people, their children and their wider families, but, as the first leg of the motion affirms, to society as a whole. I also share the concerns of those who fear that giving any kind of legal status to cohabitation or seeming to do so—the Bill, as the noble Lord said, avoids the opting-in which would be such legal status and so also the language of contract to which the noble Baroness referred—will encourage people to think that it is a healthier and more secure way of having a relationship, which it mostly is, and act as a further disincentive to people to marry, at a time when the costs that many people think that they will have to incur are clearly disincentive enough.
	In supporting proper provision for those who face "hardship and vulnerability", which are the General Synod's words, when cohabiting relationships break down and especially, but not only, for the children of and in such relationships—there is no doubt that many do suffer such hardship—I shall be on the alert for points where such compassionate and legitimate provision may run the risk of creating disincentives to marriage or of giving a status to cohabiting relationships that may weaken the ambition and desire of the large proportion of people who begin by cohabiting to move on into marriage.
	I support the principle of the Bill, too, in the face of these concerns that I share, because I do not believe that people should be pressed into marriage or into the very different civil partnership by fear of any kind. Nor can they be so pressed at a time when some commentators are describing marriage as a "luxury item"—what a terrible set of words to use about it—and, more importantly, when most are noting that the largest distinction between those who are marrying today and those who are not marrying but cohabiting is not philosophical or principled but the latter's poverty, lack of education and, often, unemployment. That is another critical question for the noble Baroness, Lady Deech.
	On the whole, the Bill succeeds in providing, and in limiting its provision to, what it calls at its beginning "basic protections". I welcome for that reason the fact that it has not gone down the road of making available some sort of opt-in to cohabitation, some kind of heterosexual equivalent to civil partnership. I welcome, too, the principles expressed in Clause 8 in the context of its provisions for the making of a financial settlement order, which state that the parties,
	"should be self-supporting as soon as possible",
	and that an award,
	"should not exceed the applicant's reasonable needs".
	The Bill is not therefore, it seems, an offer to those whom the noble Baroness, Lady Deech, described as "gold-diggers".
	I strongly welcome the unequivocal placing first in Clause 9, entitled "Matters to be considered", of,
	"the welfare of any relevant child".
	I am a good deal less sure about, and hope to explore at a later stage, Clause 9(k), 9(m) and especially 9(h), which seems to move beyond the relief of hardship and, therefore, also beyond Clause 8(3)(b).
	I have a similar anxiety about the provisions for insurance in Clauses 16 and 17, when, by definition, a cohabiting relationship has no specific expressed commitment, at any rate at its beginning. I am concerned, too, about the right given to register the death of a partner, although I realise the real hardships at the point of bereavement which, properly, that element of the Bill is designed to meet. I wonder whether that is the point of the noble Lord's recognition that there may be discussions to be had about the length of time that people take to qualify, and even whether there may be different parts of the Bill that deserve different lengths of qualifying time. On both insurance and the right to register the death—and it is not clear to me whether that is a unique right that excludes others—there may be particular questions about the rightness of two years as a qualifying period.
	I am simply puzzled by Clause 12(4), for is it not against the law for someone to be in a cohabiting relationship of the sort that I think the Bill has in mind when under the age of consent? I am well aware of walking into these questions with so many distinguished lawyers present when I may have misunderstood that clause.
	I hope that at a later stage we can explore the appropriateness of what is included and excluded by Clause 5, on "The prohibited degrees of relationship", which elucidates Clause 2(3)(b). Strictly speaking, the Bill shares the logic of the Civil Partnership Act of including reference to the prohibited degrees when it does not make the assumption, present among the commitments explicitly undertaken on entry into marriage, that the relationship is sexual. I shall take up that point in detail and express my concern about what is included.
	It seems to me that both parts of Clause 5(4) are an innovation and one that must be deeply unwelcome. Of course it is in the nature of cohabiting relationships that they cannot be regulated in these regards as marriage and then civil partnership, modelled at this point upon it, are regulated. As I read them, the two provisions in that subsection surely may be taken to encourage relationships, or at least to permit them, that fall outside the prohibited degrees for which both civil and ecclesiastical law allow no such exception. The noble Baroness, Lady Deech, also made passing reference to what is excluded from that clause. I much regret that this Bill, which, like the Civil Partnership Act, makes no assumption on its face that the relationship in view is a sexual relationship, has not taken the opportunity to begin to make provision for those, perhaps particularly those in the relationships named in Clause 5(1), who live for some time and sometimes for a very long time as a household and who suffer when, for whatever reason, they are parted or decide to move apart. Many of us remember a particularly dramatic day in the passage of the Civil Partnership Bill in this House, when for a while the House accepted that argument.
	With those questions, I support the Bill in principle as a proper attempt to make provision for people who should not be left defenceless in the face of hardship—I use both the words "defenceless" and "hardship" advisedly—when relationships which they may have thought guaranteed them some security come to an end. Of course it remains important, whether or not the Bill becomes law, to persevere in looking for ways to help so many cohabiting people realise that they are so defenceless.
	Lastly, and here I must declare an interest as my wife is a trustee of Relate, it remains important to make counselling and mediation vastly more accessible in every community and attractive to people of all sorts.

Lord Harries of Pentregarth: My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the right reverend Prelate, who has done so much to support the institution of marriage within his work in the Church of England. Like him, I pay tribute to the noble Lord, Lord Lester, for giving us an opportunity to discuss this important issue.
	Whatever the argument about this particular Bill, there is widespread agreement that when cohabiting couples split up, the children of such a union must not suffer financially and that proper laws must be in place to ensure that. This, for example, is the position of the Church of England, as expressed in the General Synod resolution and in its response to the Law Commission consultation on the subject. The category "cohabiting couples who have children" accounts for a good number of people. In 2006, for example, there were 1.49 million dependent children of cohabiting couples.
	However, there the agreement seems to stop. I refer not so much to what the right reverend Prelate said today in his own person, but to what the Church of England has said through its official documents. It seems reluctant to support the Bill as it now stands because, in addition to making provision for children, it creates, in its view, a new category of relationship—those who have lived together for two years or more—which is seen as a threat to marriage. I have a number of questions to ask about that.
	First, does it really create a new legally defined form of relationship, or is it in fact simply a legal criterion, which judges will need to use in deciding issues of financial settlement? I appreciate that if we were talking about a couple saying to each other, "I am going to commit myself to you for at least two years on the understanding that, if after that we break up, there will be an equitable settlement", and this commitment had legal basis, then we would indeed be talking about a new legal category of relations. As has already been referred to, if this was an opt-in scheme, again we would clearly have a new kind of legal relationship. However, we are not actually talking about that. We are not talking about the basis on which the couple entered upon their relationship; we are talking about the consideration that a judge would use in the event of a break-up being brought before him. The first question he will have to ask is simply: do they qualify; have they lived together for at least two years?
	The Church of England's position is that for cohabiting couples without children the judge should only be able to authorise financial support for one of the couple if it can be demonstrated that there is going to be manifest and substantial injustice as a result of the break up. This is in contrast to the Bill as it now stands, in which financial settlement would be made if the judge considered it just and equitable to do so. My first question, and it is a genuine question, is whether, if we are going to talk about a new legally defined relationship, and I have called that into question, this criterion of manifest injustice would not, at least by implication, just as much create one as does, so it has been suggested, the Bill. For if the judge is going to determine whether or not there is manifest and substantial injustice as a result of the break-up, he or she still has to refer to a relationship of some kind. Presumably, it would not, for example, be applicable to two friends or a brother and sister living together, or would it? If so, what would be the implications of that?
	My second point, and one which goes to the very heart of the matter, is whether, if it is agreed that a new legally defined relationship would come into being—I have questioned whether it would—this would indeed be a threat to marriage. The papers produced by the Church of England rightly very much have this concern in mind, but I would like to probe this a little. Let us ask why people choose to cohabit rather than marry.
	There are clearly a number of rather different reasons. One, the most idealistic, is that true love does not need the sanction of either church or state, and the couple simply wish to commit themselves to one another in, as it were, the purity of their express love. That reason may be coupled with a very strong ideological objection to state or church-sanctioned marriage. However, either way, the introduction of a new legally defined relationship is not going to affect their view of marriage. It will not make them either more or less inclined to marry; they are opposed to the whole institution anyway. A second category of couple who cohabit are those who have had a bad experience of marriage. Either they were the children of unhappy parents, or they have had a painful first marriage themselves. Again, I suggest that the introduction of a new legally defined relationship is not going to change their attitude to marriage. They have experienced it as a destructive institution with which they want nothing to do.
	Then we come to the third category: people who live together because, for personal or practical reasons, they do not feel ready to commit themselves to a public ceremony. They may think that they are too young; they may have career commitments; or they may feel that there are so many pressures on marriage today that it is best to see how the relationship goes before finally committing themselves to marriage. I think that it is this category or person that the noble Baroness, Lady Deech, particularly had in mind.
	Many couples in this category will have marriage in mind when they start to live together, and many go on to marry. However, in the early stages it is, as it were, "not yet". Is the introduction of a new, legally defined relationship likely to make people in this category less likely to enter into a marriage? It might if they already have half an eye on the financial consequences of a breakdown in their relationship; perhaps this is what the noble Baroness had in mind. They might think that in the event of a break up, as there would be an economic safety net when cohabiting, marriage is not going to offer a great deal more in the way of financial protection. I suppose that they would be in the position of those contemplating pre-nuptial financial agreements. Very prudent, no doubt, but not very romantic—and you wonder if people going into a relationship with such a hard-headed view are really in the right relationship for them in the first place; at least, frankly, I do.
	However, I concede that there may be some hard-headed, practically minded cohabitees as there are hard-headed, practical devisers of pre-nuptial agreements. But I suggest that they are not many, and that they hardly affect the argument before us today. The fact is that those cohabiting for the third set of reasons I have suggested have their own reasons for so doing. The introduction of a new, legally defined relationship of cohabitation—if that is what it is—is not going to sway them either way in their attitude to marriage. They will probably have marriage in mind, but they will move on to it in their own way at their own time. They will not be inclined to stay just as they are because of the introduction of financial safeguards for cohabitees who break up.
	I regard the institution of marriage as one of great worth in its own right, standing with a truth and luminosity that is both natural and Christian. Time does not allow me to expand on this. I also regard it as proper for our society to give marriage a special place in our law. I am, in fact, sympathetic to the argument of the late Lord Devlin in his famous debate with Professor Hart some years ago, when he said that our law quite rightly reflects the understanding of marriage given by our history, culture and religion; that it is, as he put it, the house we inhabit. Nevertheless I recognise that, as legislators, it is right that we should also approach issues like this from a utilitarian, cost-benefit analysis point of view. From that point of view, it is also true that the institution of marriage serves the common good of our society better than any other alternative.
	I am a strong believer in the institution of marriage, first and most importantly because its truth and beauty stand in its own right, but also because our law rightly reflects our history, culture and religion, and thirdly because of the economic benefits it brings to society as a whole, compared to any other alternative.
	If the institution of a new legally defined relationship of cohabitation—if it is this—served to undermine the place of marriage in our society, I would be very hesitant about adopting it. But for the reasons I have suggested, it does not seem to be the case. The introduction of this new legally defined relationship—if that is what it is—will not have the effect of deterring people from getting married. If they are cohabiting, they will continue to cohabit until, for a variety of reasons, they decide to marry, if they do. If they do so, again it will be for a range of very personal reasons.
	As has been mentioned, it is true that the number of marriages is falling. There are a number of complex reasons for this, but introducing this Bill will not increase that number, nor will refusing to introduce it shore up the institution of marriage. Besides, as I have suggested, the value of the institution of marriage exists in its own right, and the reasons for it, if they are persuasive, as I believe they are, are persuasive in their own right.
	I asked, first, whether the Bill does in fact create a new legally defined relationship, or whether, rather, it does not simply supply a judge with appropriate criteria if cases come before him looking for a proper financial settlement. That question can be answered only by the lawyers among us. Secondly, I have asked whether the criterion suggested by the Church of England that such a settlement should be for manifest and serious injustice only is so very different from that suggested by the Bill, in that if there is a new legally defined relationship presumed by the Bill, there is also one, by implication, in the alternative put forward by the Church of England. Thirdly, I showed that there are different reasons why people cohabit, and suggested that the Bill would not make them either more or less likely to marry. Finally, I believe that the reasons for marriage have cogency in their own right, and that making legal provision for cohabitees whose relationship breaks down, even if they do not have children, does not detract from the force of those reasons and does not undermine the institution.

Baroness Butler-Sloss: My Lords, I think the answer to the first question of the noble and right reverend Lord, Lord Harries of Pentregarth, is that if the Bill is passed, it will give rights to people who would not otherwise have them. Whether it creates a new class is something that I will leave to the Bill's author, the noble Lord, Lord Lester of Herne Hill.

Lord Lester of Herne Hill: My Lords, I shall deal with that point now. Clause 2(1) makes clear that cohabitation is defined only:
	"For the purposes of this Act".
	Therefore, the noble and right reverend Lord, Lord Harries, is perfectly right: this is not creating a new recognised relationship, but is laying down criteria for the courts to be able to apply, especially as regards financial provision.

Baroness Butler-Sloss: My Lords, I am a convert to the importance of regulating some aspects of cohabitation. Therefore, I support the Bill in principle. I assume that it relates to those who wish to have a sexual relationship by way of cohabitation. That is clear from the fact that one aspect of it clearly deals with such couples having children.
	I very much support marriage. I have been married for longer than the noble Lord, Lord Lester—some 50 years with a very long-suffering husband. I agree with a great deal of what the right reverend Prelate and the noble and right reverend Lord, Lord Harries, said. I do not believe that marriage will suffer as a result of the Bill. I did once, and I own up to being wrong. I entirely agree with all the reasons that the noble and right reverend Lord gave, which he set out very clearly, although I have not done the same degree of work on the measure. As the noble Lord, Lord Lester, said, the experience of other countries is that marriage has not been affected by such a measure. If it had, I would be unhappy to support the Bill. However, we need to remember that marriage, according to the statistics, thank goodness, is more stable and longer lasting, and provides something which, as the noble and right reverend Lord said, those of us who are married are glad we are part of.
	I profoundly disagree with the noble Baroness, Lady Deech. She is unjust to the lawyers who support this Bill. It is important to remember that not only did the Law Commission propose a somewhat similar Bill, but the Family Law Bar Association, Resolution—formerly the Solicitors' Family Law Association—and the Law Society supported it. They are not supporting the Bill only to get more shekels in their pockets. I declare an interest as, and am proud to be, an honorary member of Resolution. It has many lawyers dedicated to looking after unhappy couples after their relationship has broken down. They have a superb protocol that puts the welfare of children first when parties' relationships break down, and their duty is to give unpalatable advice to their clients if the breakdown is not in the interests of their children. I do not believe that the support given by the FLBA, Resolution and the Law Society is based on money grabbing.
	Of course there are lawyers who make a great deal of money out of divorce, but one aspect of the Bill is that it uses the phrase "reasonable needs", which went out some years ago as regards marriage, divorce and post-divorce settlements. Footballers' wives get large sums of money, because there is no restriction on what can be granted in the discretion of the judge. However, the discretion of the judge under this Bill would be limited to what used to be called "reasonable needs" and for a limited period.
	Another reason why I profoundly disagree with the noble Baroness, Lady Deech, is that I think she does not recognise the very real problems on the ground. Lawyers recognise them, and I hope noble Lords will forgive me for saying something as a former family judge for 35 years about my experience in trying cases. There are two sorts of women who do not necessarily know their rights or understand what they are letting themselves in for. One sort is educated and does not have the knowledge, but there are a large number of relatively uneducated women; I am not being patronising or condescending in recognising that they need help. There is a very real problem, and I have met it in the cases that I have tried. There is an unsatisfactory and unfair situation for women and children, and occasionally perhaps for disabled men, and there are vulnerable groups whose needs and human rights are not being met by the present state of the law.
	My experience is very similar to the Burns case referred to by the noble Lord, Lord Lester of Herne Hill. I have dealt with similar cases again and again. I should tell you what happens. A couple live together for, say, 17 years—as I remember in a particular case—and the woman subordinates her career to the man. She takes some part-time work, she brings up their children and they live as if they are married, but they do not get married. At the end of 17 years the man finds a younger woman and walks out—except he does not just walk out, he tells her to get out. When she says, "But I have a share of the house", he says, "The house is in my name. You have not put any money into it. You are out and I will pay something for the children". He may or may not do that, but he does not pay a penny for the roof over her head. She becomes a burden on the state. Someone has to house her, because she is a priority housing case; if he does not pay, her children are in the position of children of married couples whose fathers do not pay, but she has no rights.
	There is obscure and very complicated property law of the constructive and resulting trusts. As a non-Chancery lawyer, I have fought my way time and again through these resulting and/or constructive trusts to try to find whether a particular woman had put in sufficient money, or there was sufficient agreement between them, so I could make findings of fact that there were agreements that met up to a trust which included her having a share of the house. In 95 per cent of cases, I failed. I am astonished at my noble friend Lady Deech saying what she said, as she is a very distinguished academic lawyer, but she has not had these cases on the ground, as I have. She has underestimated or overlooked the state of property law in relation to people, mainly women, who do not have an interest in a house. That is the major point that the Bill is attacking. It is to be congratulated on attacking it, and that is the point that the Law Commission put forward.
	The Church of England paper, which I read with interest, states that this would be more expensive on legal aid. It is not a point that has been taken, except by my noble friend Lady Deech. The present law, where women try to have an interest in a house, has cases that are long and complicated and that need judges who understand the law, and they cost a great deal of money. The Bill would very much simplify the situation. The cases would be quicker and cheaper for the state as well as the individual and, almost certainly in many cases, they would have to be settled.
	The most important point is that the children of the couple who do not marry but live together for a number of years would be protected by the Bill in a way in which they are not protected now. If the primary carer is, as in most cases, the woman—most men expect the woman to be the primary carer—that woman will have no recourse to accommodation and she may end up, as we know perfectly well, despite being priority housing, in bed and breakfast accommodation with relatively young children who are very difficult to manage.

Baroness Deech: My Lords, I crave your Lordships' indulgence in raising one point. I referred to Schedule 1 to the Children Act, which gives property and other financial possibilities to women in that situation. I referred to constructive trusts, the arguments about which in fact have been very generous towards women in the most recent cases. I do not want to bore noble Lords with arguments about recent cases.

Baroness Butler-Sloss: My Lords, I accept that; I have gone slightly too far. My noble friend Lady Deech is entirely right that there are provisions, but they are nothing like as satisfactory as those that would be provided by a simplification and clarification of the law by an extension of jurisdiction to such mothers and, occasionally, fathers.
	I have reservations about certain clauses. I listened with particular interest to the right reverend Prelate, and I agreed with much of what he said. However, the Church of England's approach is unworkable and unrealistic. The approach of the right reverend Prelate is one that I very much prefer. Those reservations include whether two years where a couple have children is right, and whether it should not be two years at least for everyone. Some of the valid criticisms made by my noble friend Lady Deech could be met by other amendments to the Bill.
	I congratulate the noble Lord on introducing and pursuing the Bill; it is admirable that he has done so. It is important that this House should consider the Bill, and I very much support it in principle.

Baroness Afshar: My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Lester, for introducing this Bill. I speak as a Muslim woman and declare an interest as the chair of the Muslim Women's Network. However, here I speak in an entirely personal capacity as someone who, through training and culture, has never cohabited and who, some 30 years ago, had the good fortune to find the only man in the world who could survive being married, and staying married, to me.
	I feel that Muslim women—in particular, in this country and particularly those who are in a polygamous marriage—suffer enormously because they have no protection. In this respect, I agree with the noble Baroness, Lady Deech, that they should make a contract and that they should choose to be married. As a matter of fact, in both cases they do. In Islam, marriage is a matter of contract in which women are paid—they are entitled to payment for consenting to the marriage. I am sorry, but I find that in no way unromantic. I always thought it was essential that someone realised that I was worth a great deal and agreed to pay. Women also have the right to maintenance, to wages for housework and to payment for suckling their babies. Therefore, in that sense, all women in formal marriages who choose to work within the household are recognised as a matter of course as being in paid employment.
	However, we have an enormous problem in that those rights are not necessarily transferable across borders or nations or, unfortunately in this country, across cultures. That is the real problem for Muslim women. If their marriage is registered—it is compulsory in Iran to register all formal marriages—that registration remains, for example, in Pakistan but is not transferred to the UK when they arrive as someone's bride. They assume that they have a range of entitlements but their husbands may suddenly decide to bring in another woman. In the case of the marital contract in Iran, women are required to give their consent to a second marriage, and they can decide where they live and so on. However, none of these rights is transferred when they come to this country, and therefore any Muslim woman is at any point vulnerable to finding a second woman brought in, willy-nilly, by her husband, who does not register the second marriage either and can bring in a third and a fourth wife.
	There is much discussion among Muslims across the world as to whether men have a Koranic right to marry even a second wife. As I said, in Iran it is accepted that the only way that a second wife can be admitted to a household is with the legal written consent of the wife. However, in this country, the absence of registration and of recognition of the legally agreed entitlement of married Muslim women means that some women are more married than others. You can have women who are recognised, registered and entitled to a pension, inheritance, a house and so on, and in the same household there may be women with no rights whatever. Furthermore, under a Muslim contract, at the point of marriage a woman can decide whether she is going to share in the wealth of her husband and, even more importantly, whether her husband has any right to her wealth. One problem experienced by professional Muslim women who are married in this country informally is that their husbands may well claim their rights, particularly if these women are not familiar with the laws of the land or the language when they come in and the husband registers what they bring in as his wealth. It is very difficult to protect women who, in good faith, have entered into a contract that is supposed to give them security and protection but, when they arrive here, they become dispossessed citizens.
	Also problematic is the fact that, as their marriages are not registered, they have nothing to work with in their own defence. Of course, there is an extensive group of women who work within communities in this country who are trying very hard to ensure that the women who come in without any kind of protection have some support. In the Muslim community it is difficult to go against kinship norms and survive. We are raised to depend on our families and to protect our families and we are raised not to speak against them. To start a campaign to protect second and third wives, who are enclosed in families who do not respect their rights, is not easy.
	It is certainly not easy to register their children. In one household, you can have children who are legally recognised as the children of the husband and in the same household you can have children from the same man who have no rights to inheritance, no entitlement and are not recognised as legitimate children of the household, even though the wife, in good faith, assumes she is the wife of the man. That inequality should not be tolerated. I very much wish that we could insist on the registration of all marriages. At least, that would deal with the free choice that those women have made. To me, it is unacceptable that citizens born in this country are not recognised as the lawful children of their fathers, when their mothers had assumed, in good faith, that they would be. I very much hope that the Bill will be recognised.

Baroness Thomas of Walliswood: My Lords, this has been a very interesting, if not over long, debate. I thank the two right reverend Prelates—one still active and one retired—and the noble and learned Baroness, Lady Butler Sloss, for their extremely gentle perception of this Bill. Very acute observations were made by all three of them about the details of the Bill, but one felt the fundamental goodwill behind what they said. I am very pleased, on the behalf of my noble friend in view of the amount of work he has done, that they were able to show their very learned support.
	My noble friend has already described, with his usual expertise, the purpose of his Bill and the range of its provisions. I will not attempt to follow him down that route. However, I turn to the justification for the Bill, based on the work of researchers, the development of public opinion and the clear disadvantages of the lack of legal framework for the dissolution of such arrangements. I urge the Government to take this matter seriously. In my opinion, the best outcome would be for the Government to take over the Bill, albeit possibly in an amended form—I am not sufficient legally qualified to judge that—and promote it as their own Bill. We are all becoming very conscious of time in Parliament at the moment, and I hope that the Government will have enough time to do that.
	Whether we like it or not, and quite a lot of people do not like it, cohabitation is an increasingly common form of family life, not just in the UK but generally in the western world. Although marriage is still the most common form of family, the number of people marrying is in decline. The noble Baroness, Lady Turner, expressed that view with great clarity. A quarter of all children are born to cohabiting couples, and the majority of people in such couples, together with the public in general, think that they have the same rights as married couples. Yet the current absence of a framework for dealing with the breakdown of cohabiting couples can disadvantage both the children of such a relationship and the financially weaker of the two partners. This is the wrong that my noble friend's Bill is designed to right.
	Not everyone approaches this matter in the same way. A friend of mine in this House maintains that it costs so little to acquire the benefits of marriage by visiting the registry office that people should avail themselves of this facility instead of setting up less satisfactory arrangements. Many people might say the same, but the law has to change with the choices that people make, and people are choosing not to marry, although it is perfectly true, as several noble Lords have pointed out, that people may choose not to marry at the beginning of a relationship but marry later on. That is a different situation.
	Cohabitation is widely accepted as an acceptable way of creating a family, but that family is more vulnerable if it breaks up than other forms of family are. People who live together rather than get married may not even make wills, and if one partner has less financial clout than the other, perhaps because of being the caring parent, that person has no redress when the partnership breaks down.
	Public opinion also seems to be on the side of change. The 2008 British social attitudes survey found, among other things, that two-thirds of respondents thought that when a couple had been living together for as little as two years, and there is a child of that relationship, the man should pay child support to the woman who will be their child's chief carer. The poll also showed that the same proportion thought that a childless co-habitant should inherit the home bought by their deceased partner before their relationship began as though they were a married couple. Public opinion seems to support the rights of co-habiting couples almost as though their partnership has the same importance as marriage.
	Finally, the legal professionals in what used to be known as the Solicitors Family Law Association also support the purposes of the Bill—in fact, they have played a very large part in creating it—including its provisions on separation or the death of a partner, because they feel that co-habiting couples should be able to separate in a sensible way that assists them to end their association without damaging the partners' future. As my noble friend has explained, however, the Bill's provisions for cohabiting couples are not the same as those for married couples who divorce. The presumption is that the couple will be financially self-supporting as soon as possible, and that claims on assets will be limited to reasonable needs. The well-being of any children of the partnership will come first. That is an extremely important provision for me, as it is, I think, for all of us.
	The case for the Government taking on the Bill is considerable. Many people enter into partnership arrangements without advice on what the legal aspects of such a relationship really are. Damage to children or to the economically weaker partner can ensue, and a method of redressing this disadvantage is needed. On the other hand, nothing in my noble friend's Bill gives cohabiting couples the same rights as married couples. The Bill provides the possibility of making fair provisions in the case of the breakdown of partnerships, which is very much welcomed and supported by the very lawyers who deal with these cases and understand them the best.

Lord Henley: My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Lester of Herne Hill, will not be surprised to hear me say that I will not be able to offer him much support, but he is probably used to that by now. I am not sure that I have been able to support him on many of his Bills in the past. Having said that, I am grateful for his detailed exposition of what Resolution—formerly known as the Solicitors' Family Law Association, as the noble Baroness, Lady Deech, told us—and the noble Lord's own Odysseus Trust have put together in forming this Bill. I was interested in the name of the trust. It brought to mind Tennyson, and the noble Lord will remember his poem entitled "Ulysses", in which Odysseus reflects on old age:
	"It little profits an idle king,
	By this still hearth, among these barren crags,Match'd with an aged wife, I mete and doleUnequal laws unto a savage race,That hoard, and sleep, and feed, and know not me".
	Perhaps this is another example of the unequal laws that the noble Lord wishes to force on to the savage race which, I suppose, includes the likes of me.
	I want to explain briefly why I and, I suspect, most of my noble friends cannot support this Bill. First, as the noble Baroness, Lady Deech, made absolutely clear, it removes choice from individuals. I accept, as the noble Lord made clear in his introduction, that there is an opt-out, but it is one that the parties have to find rather than having a new status, as the noble Baroness, Lady Deech, put it, imposed on them. I also fully accept her human rights point that it is possibly a breach of human rights to be put into a position one does not wish to be put into, purely because a certain time has passed or other events have taken place. In my view, it is far better that people make the conscious decision to enter into such arrangement themselves, just as with marriage, rather than drifting into them purely by the passage of time or, as I have put it, other events.
	The noble Lord and others touched on the point about ignorance of the law, and how so many believe that there is some such thing as a common-law marriage and that they are protected. In the criminal law, ignorance is no defence. I appreciate that it is jolly difficult to know the criminal law now because the Government pass so many new criminal justice Acts. Even so, as the noble and learned Baroness the Attorney-General will assure us, lack of knowledge of changes in the law is still no defence, and the same should apply to the status of marriage, partnerships or whatever.
	I think that my second point is important. I believe that the Bill would undermine the institution of marriage, at a time when we should all be doing our utmost to support it. We have seen the statistics on many occasions showing the far better outcomes for all children when their parents live in a stable relationship and, as we all know, that stable relationship is much more likely to be marriage than some partnership of whatever form. I would like to see the Government do everything they can to support the institution of marriage. I quote Jill Kirby at the Centre for Policy Studies, when she criticised the plans as introducing a,
	"kind of marriage lite. If a man and a woman want to create a family together, then the most durable contract available to them is marriage. If they decide not to marry, then I think consequences must flow from that, and that if we introduce ... a kind of substitute version, as the Law Commission proposes"—
	she was talking about the proposals from the Law Commission rather than that of the noble Lord—
	"then it does detract from that institution and I think will lead to more confusion".
	Thirdly, if we are to have a Bill of the sort the noble Lord is talking about, it would fail to deal with other cohabitees who have similar rights. We had this argument in the then Civil Partnership Bill when it passed through the House, and I assure the noble Lord that if he pursues this proposal he will hear the arguments again. It does not deal with a carer looking after an aged parent when that aged parent dies. It does not deal with two sisters who inhabit the same house, and then one dies and the other finds that inheritance tax forces her to sell up and make other arrangements for the rest of her life. However, as I understand it, the Bill gives some inheritance tax protection to people who have been forced into a cohabitation pact, or whatever it might be.
	Fourthly, and I say this with some trepidation in the presence of the noble and learned Baroness, Lady Butler-Sloss, it creates work for lawyers. We should always remember that Adam Smith said that when two or three people of any profession get together, one can be fairly sure that there will be a conspiracy against the public. On this occasion, we have had some 5,000 members of Resolution, formerly known as the Solicitors' Family Law Association, getting together. There is ample evidence that there will be extra work for lawyers. We only have to see that to opt out of entering into some partnership, both parties have to take expert legal advice. That is not a cheap option for those parties, wise though it might be, and we can be fairly sure that later on, when these arrangements split up, there will be further calls on the public purse.
	My fifth point is to ask the noble and learned Baroness the Attorney-General what estimates the Government have made—if they have made any, because I imagine they do not want to support the Bill—about the costs to the Legal Aid Fund. We all know the pressure it is under at present. What further pressure do the Government feel is likely to be put on it by a Bill of this sort?

Lord Lester of Herne Hill: My Lords, before the noble Lord comes to his final point, can he say, on behalf of the Opposition, whether they recognise that there is a serious social problem that needs to be addressed? So far, I have not heard any recognition in what he has said.

Lord Henley: My Lords, the noble Lord will be aware that, as always with Private Members' Bills, I am speaking for myself, although I indicated that I expected that most members of my party would support the line I was taking. I accept that there are problems. The point I am making, and other noble Lords have made it, is that what is proposed does not solve those problems and, in fact, makes certain things worse, particularly as it undermines the status of marriage. I think that undermining the status of marriage is worse that what the noble Lord is trying to do.
	My sixth point is about child support, which must be the most important part of any break-up between two people who are not married. As we know, arrangements can be brought into effect for absent fathers—that is normally the case—to support their children when relationships break up and they are no longer living together. I remember being involved with my noble and learned friend Lord Mackay of Clashfern in the introduction of the first Child Support Bill some 20 years ago, or perhaps a bit less. As we know, not all that legislation is working as well as it ought to. Further attempts at reform have been made over the years, and the Government have also attempted to reform it. I think the Government, rather than going down the route of offering support to the noble Lord's Bill, would be better advised to pursue further attempts at ensuring that what we will simply refer to as absent fathers—they are not necessarily always absent fathers—do their bit to support children. Therefore, as I said at the beginning, I regret to say that I cannot offer any support to the noble Lord.

Baroness Scotland of Asthal: My Lords, on behalf of Her Majesty's Government, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Lester, for the considerable work that he has expended on the Cohabitation Bill, and for introducing it to this House, giving rise to what has been a fascinating Second Reading debate about its terms.
	I also commend the intention behind the Bill, which I understand, which is to provide financial support to couples who live together, when their relationship comes to an end. As the noble Lord knows only too well, the Government have had this issue in our sights for some time. Noble Lords will remember that we identified it as an issue that needed to be addressed and asked the Law Commission to look at it very seriously. I acknowledge that the noble Lord made that plain in his remarks. I am therefore by no means surprised by the support of my noble friend Lady Turner for the Bill.
	It may be helpful if I clarify some of the legal issues of note before I go on to explain to the noble Lord, Lord Lester, why, I regret, I am unable to support the Bill. First, on what the noble Lord said about void and voidable marriages, he will know that if a marriage is void—that is, within prohibited kinship or through failure to comply with the Marriage Acts—financial relief can be given. Where people undergo a purely religious marriage, it is invalid if it does not comply with the Marriage Acts and is not registered, as was referred to by the noble Baroness, Lady Afshar, although it is not quite as she described. Marriages contracted in countries where polygamous marriages are valid are recognised, but polygamous marriages contracted in England and Wales, where polygamy is not recognised, are invalid.
	I reassure the House that the Children Act has made significant improvements in our ability to give support and make financial arrangements for children. Indeed, we have virtually eradicated the adverse impact of illegitimacy in relation to maintenance and inheritance by a plethora of proceedings that I will not burden the House with now. We have substantial protection for children.
	I do not detract in any way from those who rightly described some of the real difficulties that women who are not aware of the real consequences of not marrying face when they discover them. However, it is important for us to look a little at the history of what we have done to try to address that issue.
	Your Lordships will know that in 2006, the Department for Constitutional Affairs, as it then was, commissioned research that suggested that some people argued for legal reform in the areas of rights to property and other assets, recognition of non-financial contributions and parental responsibility. The research showed that views about whether cohabitants should have the same or similar rights as married couples were very diverse. The diversity of view was clearly exemplified by the noble Lord, Lord Lester, in his excellent speech setting out why he wants the Bill, and the impassioned and erudite riposte by the noble Baroness, Lady Deech, giving all the reasons why she thinks we should not have such a Bill, supported by the noble Lord, Lord Henley.
	The research suggested raising awareness about the legal position of cohabitants and wider use of cohabitation agreements, or other ways of formalising arrangements, as additions or alternatives to legal reform. Your Lordships will know that we are considering how we should respond. The Government have asked the Law Commission to look at the whole question of matrimonial property agreements, including prenuptial agreements and agreements made after marriage.
	In addition, as has already been referred to, in 2005 the Ministry of Justice, as it now is, asked the Law Commission to consider further the legal position of cohabitants when their partnership ended. Its report, Cohabitation: The Financial Consequences of Relationship Breakdown, was published in July 2007 and recommended a new scheme entirely distinct from that which applies between spouses on divorce. The scheme aims to provide a sound basis on which to address any hardship and other economic unfairness that may arise when a cohabiting relationship ends. The comments made by the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Winchester rightly concentrated on hardship and disadvantage. The noble and right reverend Lord, Lord Harries of Pentregarth, interestingly introduced the idea of manifest and substantial injustice as a criterion on which financial relief should be based. That very much goes to support the Law Commission's approach of directing attention to the mischief that so many of us have wished to address.
	The Law Commission did not believe that all cohabitants should be able to obtain financial relief in the event of separation. Instead it recommended that a remedy should be available only where the couple satisfied certain eligibility requirements and had not agreed to disapply the scheme and the applicant had made qualifying contributions to the relationship giving rise to certain enduring consequences at the point of separation. Noble Lords will know that provisions for cohabitants to receive financial provision when relationships break down were introduced in Scotland in 2006. This protection is very different from that given to married couples. It is based on the concept of compensation for losses incurred, and the share of gains accrued, as a result of the cohabitation together. This Government would like an opportunity to assess how the Scottish provisions operate in practice before considering what might be the best approach for England and Wales, which is a much larger jurisdiction. I heard what the noble Lord said about it not materially impacting on marriage and there being very few cases so far. We understand that the Scottish Executive have not yet set a timetable for the evaluation of their legal provisions for cohabitants but that they do intend to evaluate them.
	We feel that the Bill introduced by the noble Lord, Lord Lester, goes further than the Law Commission's proposals. The Law Commission's report looked at addressing hardship, but the Bill is about dividing assets in a manner that is akin, but not identical, to the Matrimonial Causes Act 1973. It is fair to say that we have concerns about the Bill's provisions. We believe that to support it would be to take a wrong approach towards addressing the mistaken perception that cohabitation confers a quasi-marital legal status. Although we entirely accept that that is not the intention of the noble Lord, Lord Lester, the provisions will be likely to result in costly and complex legislation, and that is not sustainable. The impact and the numbers affected would be significant. According to the 2001 census, the number of couples living together exceeded 2 million, and analysis suggests that cohabiting couples are more likely to separate than married couples. We believe that the approach adopted in the Bill would be likely to generate litigation on a large scale, with a vastly increased burden on individuals, the legal aid fund, the courts and judicial resources.
	We are also, importantly, dealing with the question of an individual's freedom of choice, though I would perhaps not describe it quite as the noble Baroness, Lady Deech, did, as a "corner of freedom". In the Government's view, cohabitants should have a choice about when to change their legal status in relation to another adult. Any alteration of that legal status should not be dependent on the taking of limited legal advice, with that advice itself being subject to change over time. However, I do not suggest for a moment that those putting forward these provisions do so on the basis of wishing to make more money for lawyers. I declare an interest as a family lawyer who has been a member of the Family Law Bar Association. As someone who has worked closely with solicitors from a similar discipline I can say that the intent of family lawyers is to try to assist families and children to resolve their issues smoothly and in a way which is beneficial to the parties and not to their own pockets. So I cannot agree that that was the intent behind the provisions. None the less, they would be costly.
	Young people often enter into relationships that they do not intend will end in marriage. As other noble Lords have said, these are often transient relationships that a person may repeat two or three times before choosing someone whom they wish to make their lifelong partner and/or marry. We believe that a better approach would be to seek to correct the mistaken perception rather than to change the law to match the mistake. The Bill builds-in the involvement of lawyers in a way that we do not believe is appropriate. It would create incentives for going to court and fuel the litigation culture, and that runs counter to the Government's view that only those cases that require judicial intervention should come into the justice system. Instead, as has already been said, there should be an encouragement of mediation and alternative dispute resolution to settle these conflicts in both family and civil matters. Indeed, further to the various government initiatives to help families resolve parental disputes when they have turned to the courts for help in deciding who a child should live with and see, some 40 per cent of the orders—28,000 in 2008-09—are made by consent. We believe that sufficient provision for financial and property protection is already available to couples who live together, with the principal barriers being ignorance and, sometimes, regrettably, inertia.
	I am sure that your Lordships will also appreciate that in addition to those concerns, in practical terms, we already have a very full and challenging legislative timetable. Of course I hear the plea, "Could we not squeeze just one more little thing in?". I am grateful that I am not the business manager and do not have that burden placed on my shoulders. However, I do think that it would be a bit of a challenge.
	Although more needs to be done, we are already doing as much as we can to address conflict within families, stabilise relationships and reduce the trauma to children. I would not say that our work is finished, but the provisions in the Bill are somewhat at odds with the work we are doing with families and vulnerable groups to protect them better and help them to build stable family lives. We are spending significant sums focusing on the National Offender Management Service, which delivers a broad range of interventions to address particular risks. I say that because we are concentrating on parenting and relationship skills, and spending appropriately on training, education, work and matters of that sort.
	In addition to the initiatives we started, in January 2005 the Government published Parental Separation: Children's Needs and Parent's Responsibilities—Next Step, which sets out our plans to deliver a range of measures designed to help separating parents in dispute to decide who a child should live with and see and to reach agreement about future parenting arrangements. Research has shown that when separation goes badly, in particular where children are drawn into parental conflict, the effects can be very damaging regardless of whether the parents are married.
	The cross-government work has delivered improvements in the information available to parents and a greater use of alternative dispute resolution mechanisms, such as mediation and conciliation at the start of court proceedings delivered by the Children and Family Court Advisory Support Service. We continue to promote these methods as a better way of reaching agreement than through contested court hearings. We have issued self-help guides such as Putting Children First: Parenting Plans, a guide to separating parents to help them work out the best possible arrangements for their children by showing them the various arrangements that have worked well for different families in different circumstances. The guides have an average distribution of 4,800 per month and should be available in solicitors' offices, court waiting rooms and GP surgeries. It is by linking these initiatives that we can consider further how to raise awareness about the needs and rights of cohabitants, instead of complex and expensive legislation.
	Further work is being carried out by the Department for Children, Schools and Families, which is now leading on work to improve services for separating parents. Last December a package of support for adults and children experiencing family breakdown, or at greatest risk of experiencing it, was announced. That included local pilots to test the provision of better co-ordinated local support for separating and separated parents.
	Separating parents have a number of practical and emotional issues to resolve following separation, which include child maintenance, child contact, benefits, tax credits, and legal, housing and work matters. For many, the emotional and practical issues are inextricably linked. Many families need either access to counselling and mediation services or practical and legal support, delivered in a way that really makes a difference.
	The noble Lord's Bill deals with a number of important issues, and I hope that from what I have said your Lordships will accept that our priority is to help individuals who are in exactly the situation that has been described in this debate. From the provisions your Lordships will know that, in areas such as bereavement and registration of death, we accept that there is a case for some reform in the interests of fairness. Action is already proposed, for example, to amend the Fatal Accidents Act 1976 and the Coroners and Justice Bill, currently in the other place, which the Bill would duplicate.
	The principal element of the Bill is, in effect, provision for the equivalent of the division of property on divorce or dissolution of civil partnership to be available for former cohabitants, provided that they apply within two years of the end of their relationship. I hear what the noble Lord says: that structure could be changed, the timing could be looked at and the nature of the criterion could be looked at. We fear, however, that the proposals, including the opt-out, are complex. There are real issues about when legal advice was taken, as people could subsequently seek to suggest that, with the effluxion of time, the conditions had changed since the agreement was made, and so on. Those complexities are very real.
	The insurance has been referred to. It is already possible for people to assign insurance policies to named individuals. The Law Commission and the Scottish Law Commission issued a joint consultation paper on insurable rights in January 2008. The response was published in May 2008, and they will be publishing an impact statement with a final report and draft Bill on consumer insurance in the future.
	With regard to wills, noble Lords will know that provisions can be made where there is a will; where there is none, we already have provisions that apply if the couple is living together at the time of the death. Bereavement damages, as I have mentioned, can be provided for.
	On the registration of death, the Government have included provisions that would deal with that matter in the Coroners and Justice Bill, which received its Second Reading on 26 January this year. We now have a plethora of advice provision regarding this issue. The Government fund the Advicenow website with the Advice Services Alliance, and we have had over 1 million visits to that site. We work in partnership with Amazon and ASA. The media campaign LivingTogether is now in its fourth year. A study by Professor Anne Barlow has assessed that campaign, and she says that it is very positive. We also have the One Plus One website. We are looking at new ways in which we can raise awareness with activities in schools. There are also better links across government for providing advice, with the DWP supplying pension advice and the Land Registry advice when couples buy property. There is the potential for doing more, including a one-stop shop.
	I therefore understand entirely the thrust of, and purpose behind, the noble Lord's Bill. I also understand the opposition to it of the noble Lord, Lord Henley. I understand, too, the plea made in support of it by the Liberal Democrat Benches. I assure the House that we will continue to look at this matter—the Government have not resiled from it—but we do not think that this Bill is necessarily the right vehicle to bring home the strong desire of the noble Lord, Lord Lester, to provide help in respect of the aberrant effects that sometimes befall those who have previously cohabited. However, I assure the noble Lord, Lord Lester, that I have raised with my colleagues in the Ministry of Justice his plea in this regard, and I am sure that they will stand ready to have further discussions with him.

Lord Lester of Herne Hill: My Lords, it is customary for somebody introducing a Private Member's Bill to begin his or her reply by saying, "I am extremely grateful to everyone who has taken part. The speeches have been extraordinarily wise and interesting, and I shall read all of them". On this occasion, I happen to believe what I have just said to be true and not part of the customary flattery or gratitude that we all express to each other in this most admirable institution.
	I have listened to an extraordinary range of extremely wise speeches. When I listened to the right reverend Prelate and former Bishop, if that is the right way of referring to both of them, I realised that the Church of England cannot be described as the Conservative Party at prayer, as it once was. I have listened to speeches that are extraordinarily well informed. Perhaps the most devastating was that of the noble and learned Baroness, Lady Butler-Sloss, in dealing with the comments of the noble Baroness, Lady Deech, who made a very interesting speech which was about the same length as mine. I cannot really answer the noble Baroness, Lady Deech, in less than the time that she took herself, and I would not dream of doing so now. She said that she had thought about her speech for 30 years, but, after 30 years, she still does not seem to recognise the serious practical problems that ordinary people, especially working-class people, face under our current legal system. I think that almost everyone else and the Government have recognised those to be serious social problems.
	I was counselled once by a very distinguished Conservative to consider the observation of the Judge Learned Hand, that the spirit of liberty is the spirit that is not too sure that it is right. I am not sure that the noble Baroness, Lady Deech, shares that view, but I keep the comment in my own chambers to remind me about the danger of dogmatism. I certainly feel that what has been said today, especially by the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Winchester, ought to be debated in the form of amendments that probe and deal with some of the important issues that have been raised. I am very grateful to everyone. The problems of religious minorities, especially those of Muslim women, are really serious. I am indebted to the noble Baroness, Lady Afshar, for drawing our attention to them.
	Perhaps I may be allowed a little joke in saying that the Attorney-General has done her best as a great advocate to make bricks without straw—by "straw", I mean the right honourable Jack Straw, because it will ultimately be him and the Treasury who decide whether to do anything at all in legal terms before the next general election. It is their responsibility, not mine, to decide whether they are content to run the risk, should they lose power, of losing the only the opportunity that they will have to give some safety net to people who are highly vulnerable and their children.
	I am an extraordinary optimist. It took me only 30 years to get the Human Rights Act, and I like to think that it might take less time to get this one. The Attorney-General will remember that at about this time of year we had a debate on the Forced Marriage (Civil Protection) Bill. At that time, the Government were opposed to the Bill that I had put forward. It was debated here, just as it has been today, and the Leader of the House, standing in for the noble and learned Baroness, Lady Scotland, expressed not exactly hostility but certainly scepticism about the Bill. And then something remarkable happened, at about the same time of year: the Prime Minister personally decided to be in favour of the Bill. We sat down with Ministry of Justice officials and, by June, we had taken my Bill and turned it into something that the Government could commend.
	I am perfectly sure that, if that political decision were now taken, it would be possible to strip out of my Bill any duplication—for example, with bereavement, and matters of that kind—to look at whether the two-year period was the right one or a longer one was necessary, and to try to avoid the situation in which the hated legal profession was in a position to be able to give people proper legal advice to protect their human rights. All those matters could be taken into account.
	We do not have time to have a Select Committee on the Bill that would take evidence but, when the Law Commission has taken evidence and when we have taken evidence, the Government have no evidence whatever for the assertions that they have made today about how the Bill would increase litigation and be very expensive. That is not evidence-based but simply an assumption being put forward as an argument. On that sort of argument, when I was doing the Sex Discrimination Bill I remember the Lord Chancellor's Department telling me that, if we extended it to schools, 5,000 cases a year would be brought by dissatisfied schoolchildren and their parents and that under no circumstances should it apply to education at all. There has been less than one case per year over the past 30 years—not 5,000 a year. It is very easy for Ministers to exaggerate grossly what they think might follow from a Bill.
	I have not done justice to all the speeches, but I thank everyone. I am sure that the noble Baroness, Lady Deech, will forgive me if I do not seek to persuade her, after 30 years, that she might just be mistaken in some of what she said. I do not think that I could ever achieve that. For all those reasons, I think that the right thing to do is to ask your Lordships to give the Bill a Second Reading.
	Bill read a second time and committed to a Committee of the Whole House.

City of Westminster Bill [HL]
	 — 
	Second Reading

Moved By Baroness Gardner of Parkes
	That the Bill be read a second time.

Baroness Gardner of Parkes: My Lords, the main purpose of this Private Bill is to deal with the regulation of street trading in the City of Westminster. Westminster is in a unique position among local authorities in this country, given its status as an international and national tourism, shopping and business centre. As a result, the streets of the city are thronged with shoppers; I do not need to tell your Lordships that certain parts of the West End, including Oxford Street, Regent Street, Soho and Covent Garden, have some of the highest pedestrian footfalls in the country. Because of that, the streets of the city are a very attractive place for street traders to be. That in turn presents the city council with a range of issues that other local authorities may not have. That is why in the 1990s the city council promoted its own Private Bill to deal with street trading. That Bill became the City of Westminster Act 1999. The Act has generally worked well, but a number of deficiencies have been highlighted over the course of the past 10 years. The council believes that a case for revising the Act has been made. Therefore, last year the council chose to promote this Bill which, if enacted, would repeal the 1999 Act and re-enact it with some important changes.
	Street trading in Westminster has of course been going on for hundreds of years. The city council recognises that it can add to the vibrancy and colour of the street scene and can provide a convenient shopping alternative, but it needs to be controlled. Under the existing legislation and the Bill, the council is entitled to designate areas where licensed street trading can take place. Street trading outside such areas is an offence. A licence is needed to trade in designated areas. The council is able to control the trading by the imposition of conditions, and it is able to specify what type of goods can be sold at any street trading pitch. There are a number of reasons for the need to control street trading; and at the foremost of the council's mind will be the safety and convenience of pedestrians.
	The council has, thanks to the 1999 Act and earlier London Acts, had a good deal of success in controlling unlicensed street trading that was becoming a major problem in Westminster. In the late 1980s and the 1990s, the council reached the view that the relatively small fines the magistrates were handing out for unlicensed street trading were becoming nothing more than an inconvenient business expense for illegal street traders; that is if they could be identified and prosecuted at all.
	Therefore, one of the additional strings that the council added to its bow was the power to seize items used for illegal street trading. This power has been key to reducing particularly the amount of trading by mobile hot-dog vendors in the West End. An illustration of how effective Westminster is at street trading enforcement can be seen a stone's throw from this place. The boundary between Westminster and Lambeth runs across the centre of Westminster Bridge. If one crosses the bridge, one will often find unlawful street traders trading tatty tourist merchandise right up to the boundary of the Lambeth side, safe in the knowledge that the Westminster's enforcement officers cannot touch them. A number of your Lordships have commented to me on how difficult it is to even to walk across Westminster Bridge. After you hit the halfway mark, with all the tourists and other people, and this proliferation of street traders, it is a real problem.
	The Bill alters—the council would say improves—the 1999 Act in a number of ways, of which these are examples. It provides more flexibility to the council in terms of how it designates licensable areas within which street trading can be licensed; it gives the council more flexibility in varying existing street trading licences; it provides the councils with more discretion in deciding whether to allow an application for a licence; and it broadens the range of conditions that can be imposed on a licence; it sets out new general grounds on which the council can refuse to grant a street trading licence, including the safety or convenience of people using the street, the prevention of crime or disorder, the amenity of the area, and the suitability of the applicant.
	I stop to focus on amenity for a second, as this is a novel ingredient in street trading legislation. Under the Bill, not only would it be a factor for the council to consider when dealing with an application for a licence, but also when deciding whether to designate an area as a place in which licences should be capable of being granted at all. A significant proportion of the city falls within statutorily designated conservation areas. There are also significant numbers of listed buildings in the city. In turn, it follows that planning controls over development, particularly new buildings, are generally more stringent than in other areas. This is not currently reflected in the control of street trading. While the council does have some control over the appearance of stores and the goods on display, the control is limited and no specific reference is made in the existing legislation to amenity. Those at the council responsible for planning are particularly keen to ensure that street trading does not take place in areas where it would have a deleterious effect on the setting of valuable streetscapes.
	Having emphasised the amenity aspect, I stress that other factors are also of great importance in deciding whether to designate a place as a licensable area, or grant a licence—perhaps none more so than the safety and convenience of other highway users. The Bill makes new and special provision about markets in the city. There are no charter markets in the city, although there are a few street markets, consisting of a conglomeration of a number of traders holding individual street-trading licences. The council is keen to ensure the preservation and vitality of the markets in the city. The Bill is intended to achieve this by giving the councils greater controls, particularly over the location of traders within a particular market area.
	New powers to suspend licences immediately would be introduced in cases where the licence holder has used dangerous, abusive or violent behaviour. Limited new powers are given to enable licensed street trading to be carried out by a company rather than an individual. By the same token, the Bill also limits the existing right of a licence holder to nominate a family member or successor to succeed him or her as a holder of the licence. This right of succession, which currently applies only to street traders in London, will be allowed for one more generation in Westminster.
	I have already mentioned seizure and hot-dog trolleys. The Bill would enhance the council's powers in relation to seizure of hot-dog trolleys and other food receptacles, enabling it to dispose of them more efficiently. The council seizes enormous numbers of these trolleys in the West End under its existing powers. The people from whom they are seized rarely, if ever, claim them back. That means that the council wastes a great deal of money storing them unnecessarily and obtaining a court order before disposing of them. The Bill would allow disposal in cases where the item is seized and notice given to the person in charge, informing him of his right to require the council to obtain a disposal order, and that right is not exercised. The council's experience is that offenders are reluctant to identify themselves, because they know that they will be successfully prosecuted, so it is likely that notices will not be returned and the trolleys can be disposed of more readily, saving the council tax payers of the city considerable amounts of money.
	It must be stressed that, with all the new powers, there are checks and balances in the Bill. The schedules to the Bill set out in detail the processes, including consultation, and the ability for those affected to make representations that the council must go through when making decisions that are likely to affect street traders.
	The Bill contains provision for appeals against decisions of the council, including decisions to refuse to grant a licence or to revoke a licence. The Bill would ensure that trading could continue in appropriate cases until appeals are disposed of. There are provisions to enable compensation to be paid in cases where items are seized unlawfully by the council. Although the Bill has engendered opposition from a representative street traders' organisation, which I will come to in a minute, I stress that there is plenty in the Bill to ensure the protection of existing street traders and their licences.
	Before moving on to the petitions, I should mention the one clause that is not concerned with street trading; namely, Clause 52, which deals with touting. Similar provisions exist in private legislation elsewhere in the country, to prohibit touting for certain types of leisure-related businesses on the street. In some ways, it is rather odd that the council does not have similar powers, given the huge number of attractions, particularly in the West End. I stress that the clause does not deal with ticket touting. In fact, the sale of tickets in the street is actually street trading, and is regulated by the other clauses in the Bill.
	I now turn to the three petitions that have been deposited against the Bill. As a general point, if your Lordships give it a Second Reading today, it will of course be for the Select Committee to which the Bill is referred to investigate the cases of the petitioners and the council with the customary fine-toothed comb, but it behoves me to say a few words about each petition.
	First, a petition has been lodged by a number of individuals who hold pedlars' certificates. Under the 1999 Act, holders of pedlars' certificates are exempt from the street-trading licensing regime if they are carrying out their trading by means of house-to-house visits. The Bill does not change this position, and for that reason the council is challenging the locus standi of the petitioners.
	Perhaps at this point it would be appropriate to raise the issue of human rights. The Minister for Trade, Investment and Consumer Affairs, Gareth Thomas, has, in accordance with the Standing Orders of this House, reported on compatibility with the European Convention on Human Rights. He says that, save in respect of the restriction on pedlars, he believes that the promoters have undertaken a full assessment of the compatibility of the Bill's proposals with the convention, and he sees no need to dispute their conclusions. He says that he has not seen the evidence that the promoters rely on to justify restrictions as being in the general interest. I have no doubt that the promoters will produce that evidence in Committee.
	The second petition is from Associated Newspapers, the publishers of the Evening Standard. They have detailed concerns about the news vendor provisions, which are altered under the Bill. Under the 1999 Act, news vendors have an exemption from the street trading regime if certain conditions are met. The Bill alters some of those conditions, particularly as regards the type of booth which can be used, and also gives the council power to designate areas—for example, where inconvenience or danger may be caused to other road users—where the exemption should not apply. London Transport is concerned that people entering major Underground stations may be hampered by the presence of an unsuitably sized or positioned paper-seller's booth. The council will meet with the petitioners soon to discuss their concerns further and I hope that an amicable solution will be achieved.
	Finally, the National Market Traders Federation has petitioned. Obviously, the council takes this petition seriously as the federation represents a good number of the existing licensed street traders in the city. The promoters met the federation on more than one occasion in the lead-up to the Bill, consulted it and, having heard its concerns, made changes to the draft Bill before it was deposited. Clearly, there is not yet a meeting of minds because the federation's petition extends to 86 paragraphs, all of which are being carefully studied by the council. Over the coming weeks in the lead-up to the Select Committee hearing, there will be no doubt be discussions between the parties in an attempt to reach an amicable solution. The council would, ideally, want to have the support of the traders for its proposals, if at all possible.
	The council does not wish to leave your Lordships with the impression that the Bill is all about strengthening the council's controls against the interests of street traders. On the contrary, the council works with them on many fronts. For example, it works with them to find alternative sites when they have concerns about their existing location, or when building works affect them. A study has been undertaken of street trading practices in Westminster and a number of recommendations have been made. The council will be working closely with the traders to pilot some of the recommendations.
	I hope that your Lordships will give the Bill a Second Reading and allow this well intentioned measure to pass today so that it can be scrutinised fully in Select Committee, where the evidence of witnesses both for and against the Bill will no doubt be given careful attention. I beg to move.

Lord Graham of Edmonton: My Lords, given my knowledge of the procedures of this House, I realise that the Bill will be very closely scrutinised in the appropriate Committee. However, this Second Reading provides us with an opportunity to canter over the course. I declare interests: some years ago I was the parliamentary consultant to the National Market Traders Federation. Like other joint presidents of London Councils, the noble Baroness, Lady Hamwee, and the noble Lord, Lord Jenkin, I am interested in London affairs. Besides that, of course, I represented Edmonton, which has a fine market, and nearby Enfield has a charter market. Modestly, I say simply that I have an interest in this Bill. The size of the Bill is 50 pages and, frankly and sincerely, it is full of good stuff; it is what a local council ought to be doing to ensure a marriage of the interests it seeks to serve.
	The electorate put the council in place, but my caveat is that, although the noble Baroness was fair to point out the range of matters included, she referred to the National Market Traders Federation. When I saw the Bill I asked the federation, "Let me have a general note". The note I received stated:
	"It is feared that the trade and interests that the NMTF represents and the property rights and interest of its members would be injuriously affected by the provisions of the bill. There are concerns over almost all the aspects of the bill but in particular the provisions relating to rescission and variation of designating resolutions and designating alternative sites".
	Undoubtedly, the members of the committee will have their hands full when trying to reconcile these issues.
	My main point, which I hope bears fruit with Westminster City Council, is that we live in a unique age at a unique stage of development. I have no objection to a council periodically, especially this council—which as the noble Baroness pointed out has within its environment a number of fine and heavily trafficated areas—protecting major matters of interest. However, it should be very careful regarding people's livelihoods and, in fact, their lives. Throughout the country many people are losing their jobs and livelihoods, and no market trader has a prescriptive right to remain on the same spot as where his father or grandfather stood for many years to continue the same trade in the same circumstances. However, the council should think twice before taking any action that would deprive an existing market trader of his opportunity to continue.
	I looked at the Bill quickly and at the clause that deals with succession. One of the vexed issues that I discovered during my time was passing on the licence from a father or mother to a son. The licence is very precious—it is their licence to live, as well as to trade. A lot of stuff in the Bill will come back to us.
	Reference was made to the activities of pedlars, who need to be more strictly controlled here and elsewhere than they have been. There have been attempts to bring up to date the Pedlars Act, but some authorities have been forced to take their own action. In my view, this is an issue of national interest.
	I was delighted when I saw that on Thursday 26 March, the noble Lord, Lord Lee of Trafford, has a Question,
	"to ask Her Majesty's Government what advice they are giving to local authorities to promote the development of markets as an alternative to high street shopping".
	I see markets not as an alternative to high-street shopping, but as part of the shopping scene. There ought to be a strategy locally, especially where they exist, to make sure that markets, which have been with us for hundreds if not thousands of years, are not driven underground. There is a fear among members of the National Market Traders Federation about the way in which the supermarkets and the new forms of trading are being advanced. I happen to know that, because I am on Edmonton Green market quite regularly. It is a changing scene, with different traders and different composition on the green. There is a massive supermarket there, and I say good luck to it, because competition is the spice of life.
	The only word that I shall say to Westminster Council and its advisers in the Committee is that they should bear in mind that this is not just a question of a piece of legislation. I was the leader of a London council many years ago. One needs to have regard to the fact that the vibrancy of a community is very often enhanced by the ability of its market to survive and trade. I wish the Bill well in its progress into Committee. In Committee, the National Market Traders Federation will have an opportunity to put its points across, and I wish it well.

Lord Lucas: My Lords, I am grateful to my noble friend for advancing the Bill, and I am doubly grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Graham of Edmonton, for what he has just said. I agree with almost everything he said about sending a message that the House feels that the Bill is important. Although in essence it deals with a matter that may be seen as local to Westminster, it actually deals with something that is part of the heart of our experience of London and therefore, one way or another, is part of the life of tens of millions of people in this country when they visit London or come to Westminster from the other parts of London in which they live.
	It seems to me enormously important that markets should be allowed to flourish, particularly at times like these, and that they should be expanded. We have seen over the past 20 or 30 years the process of high streets becoming more and more boring, with just another edition of large chains, with every high street identical to every other. The difficulties of setting up a small shop, with the demands that landlords have been making and the requirements for rates and other regulations, have made it very difficult and often financially fatal for people to try to start small businesses in that way. Providing people with an opportunity to start trades off a barrow, as I think the original Sainsbury did, and then to grow from there, seems to me to be absolutely the right thing to be doing at this time. It is the right thing to do for the health of our high streets and for all our enjoyment and experience of shopping in the streets of London and elsewhere.
	It is a very important Bill and I hope that the Committee on the Bill will be brave in its defence of our enjoyment of London. There are times when Westminster City Council seems intent on prettifying and cleaning up London, rather than leaving it enjoyable, messy in corners, rumbustious, vital and alive. That is something to which we should feel able to raise objection.
	I have particular concerns about some aspects of this Bill, which gives very broad powers to the council, often with no clear reason. Doubts have been raised by the National Market Traders Federation and others about what these powers are required for, what the intention of the council is and whether it wants to clear away these inconvenient stalls into covered markets in recently redundant Woolworth premises or other properties. The council needs to justify why it wants powers of the breadth that it is applying for.
	There also seems to be in the Bill a lack of rights of appeal against council decisions. I find it immensely disturbing that a Conservative council should seek to go down that road. It seems to me fundamental that, where a Bill is capable of taking away people's livelihoods, there should be a proper right of appeal, but the legislation does not seem to provide for compensation when someone's livelihood is taken away. That is a fundamental part of the balance between the council and the market traders. If the council suffers nothing when it does damage to a market trader, it has no disincentive to act in that way. It can sweep away markets without any fear that it will suffer a result and therefore does not have an incentive to balance the arguments. If it has to pay proper compensation for doing something capriciously or out of turn, or for no good or compelling reason, it will think carefully before it does and will balance the arguments. At any rate, compensation is something that, again, should be in this sort of legislation.
	The Bill removes the familic right of succession, which I think is a terrible thing to do. A lot of these pitches have run in families for a long time. It is true that markets should be open to new entrants but perhaps the council should accommodate that by increasing the number of pitches. If there is a demand for people to trade in that way and a demand from the users of the City of Westminster to buy in that way, perhaps the council should look at opening additional pitches. It should not deprive families of a right and an interest that they have had for generations. The noble Lord's party legislated—I suspect against the opposition of these Benches—to give that right to farm tenants, although I do not think that anyone on these Benches would take that away from them. I very much hope that this Government will set their mind against depriving market traders of similar intergenerational interest and will recognise that it is part of our national life.
	The Bill also seeks to control the types of goods sold. What makes Westminster the best judge of what kind of goods should be sold in a market or of how many stalls in a market should sell particular types of goods? It does not particularly control that on a high street; it certainly does not tell Tesco what it should sell. On what basis does the council want those powers? I can understand that there might be some such control by some landlords exercising this power in a mall, but the level of control sought by the council seems to be excessive.
	Most of all, I am surprised that the council should have brought this Bill before us with such a level of disagreement from the National Market Traders Federation. I do not see why that body, which cannot be well funded—certainly not as well funded as the City of Westminster—should have to argue this out in a public forum rather than being properly consulted and properly engaged in the preparation of the Bill. It is not an inimical organisation; it is quite capable of reaching a proper compromise. The Bill should have reached us with only a few matters outstanding and not the wholesale objection raised by the National Market Traders Federation.
	Perhaps I should say something nice about Westminster. I am quite happy with its provision for crunching hot-dog trolleys. They seem to be a nuisance but, again, perhaps I may express my disappointment: these trolleys exist because people want access to refreshment on the street. There are many other cities in Europe where it is easy to find refreshment on the street of great variety and great quality. Westminster is saying, "No, you can't have anything", and is clamping down on what is available. I agree that what is available is pretty disgusting, but why not, instead, let a contract to Heston Blumenthal or someone similar? If he can take on Little Chef, surely he would take on hot-dog trolleys. Westminster should get some decent catering out there on the streets in the way that people who use the area want. As I said, Westminster as a city should not be free of smells; it should be full of wonderful smells, and I hope that we would encourage Westminster to take a positive, constructive and inventive attitude towards improving the city, rather than thinking of it as something on the front of the proverbial chocolate box and not to be disturbed by human activity.
	I hope that the Committee will take a gentle attitude towards the petition by the pedlars. These days, when people who are not well organised or well represented approach this House asking to be heard, we should treat that approach as generously as possible and not try to default them on a technicality. If their arguments do not apply, we can disregard them but we should hear them.

Baroness Hamwee: My Lords, I follow what the previous two speakers said, particularly the noble Lord, Lord Lucas. I follow the noble Lord, Lord Graham of Edmonton, in declaring an interest as a joint president of London Councils.
	We hear that Westminster is a very particular borough. It occurs to me that it may not be quite as particular as it used to be. London is growing and not just on the fringes; the characteristics of the centre are now more widely spread. Other boroughs suffer the stresses and have the interests that, in recent history, were more confined to Westminster: parts of Kensington and Chelsea, the southern part of Islington now and Hackney, over longer history, and, of course, the City of London where there must have been issues relating to market traders and pedlars. I, for one, am very happy to see the shopping magnets dispersed around London and the shopping opportunities more widely spread. The same issue applies to commercial areas; we are used to thinking of the City of London and the City of Westminster as the major commercial areas. That is relevant to news vendors. It is not the same now. You only have to look at the number of people pouring out of London Bridge station and not crossing London Bridge to realise that the south bank of London is a very vibrant and important commercial area.
	Like other speakers, I view markets as complementary to other types of retail. I do not think this is the right time to make market trading harder, either for the public or for the traders, unless it is to achieve an investment, not to prettify, but to make more comfortable and update some of the facilities available to those who work in markets and who shop in them. One has only to think of experiences on mainland Europe, where markets fulfil a different and more important role in people's lives than they do here. It should not be a matter of personal aesthetics, such as look or smell, but I agree that the smell of hot dogs is pretty revolting. That does not apply to all food. Last summer, I was in Edinburgh when there was a French—perhaps that word should be in inverted commas—market and the smells from it were irresistible. The noble Lord, Lord Lucas, did not quite say that he was talking about the control of goods, but markets, like other things, respond to the market.
	The news vendors' situation is changing because of free papers. Five years ago, they were not accosted by people trying to get rid of their supply of papers. This gives rise to issues of litter, recycling facilities and so on.
	The noble Lord, Lord Lucas, made a very important point about pedlars. We are about to deal on Report with the Local Democracy, Economic Development and Construction Bill, which has clauses about petitions. The point has been made, quite rightly, by the Government and very much by the Opposition that a petition to a local authority can take pretty much any form. It does not have to be formal. This House, this Parliament, should be as open to representations as local authorities are and should not require them to be made in a particular form in order for them to be considered seriously.
	The Opposed Bill Committee will be the right place for the detail of the Bill to be considered. One is accustomed at the end of a Second Reading debate on a Bill such as this to wish the Bill a fair wind. I have some reservations on this occasion, and I hope that we see the right result at the end of the proceedings.

Lord De Mauley: My Lords, we are becoming used to these borough and city council Bills, having seen several of them in the past few years, including the Bournemouth Borough Council Bill and the Manchester City Council Bill. We support the right of councils to bring forward measures to regulate street trading. Nevertheless, the Select Committee on the Bournemouth Borough Council Bill and the Manchester City Council Bill expressed concern about,
	"the use of piecemeal private legislation to remedy perceived problems in national legislation".
	It recommended that,
	"the Government should undertake an urgent review of the law on trading in the streets and selling from door to door with a view to producing national legislation which reflects current conditions".
	I quite understand that I cannot necessarily expect the Minister to answer questions today on this Private Bill, but it would be helpful to know whether the Government have given any more thought to the Select Committee's recommendations on those earlier Bills, and whether any action has been taken in this regard.
	The Select Committee also proposed that the promoters of those Bills undertake to give particular attention to the training of the officers charged with the enforcement of the legislation so that genuine pedlars operating under it are not prevented from carrying on their trade. Once again, it would be helpful if the Minister could tell us what progress has been made in that area.
	As I have said, we support the right of local councils to amend street trading controls as appropriate. At the same time, however, we are concerned that street traders and pedlars—as the noble Lord, Lord Graham, has said, they are two rather different groups, and it would be wrong to confuse them—who operate lawfully and are appreciated and valued by members of their communities and the public generally should not be unduly restricted, stigmatised or criminalised. During the debate in another place on the Manchester City Council Bill, my honourable friend Mr Christopher Chope argued that,
	"the Bills seek to penalise the lawful pedlar and take away the rights that he has had since legislation was introduced in 1871".—[Official Report, Commons, 29/10/08; col. 960.]
	The Explanatory Note to the City of Westminster Bill says that Clause 19 gives,
	"general discretionary grounds for refusal of an application for a licence".
	These include,
	"the convenience or safety of people using the street ... the applicant's suitability to hold a licence",
	and,
	"the diversity of items on sale and services provided by street traders and other retailers in the area".
	These provisions present the flexibility which my noble friend Lady Gardner has helpfully described. We support her desire to reduce illegal street trading, particularly if it could be construed as a public nuisance or even a public danger. We are, however, concerned to ensure that lawful traders and pedlars are protected, so while I, like other noble Lords, look forward to seeing the results of the Select Committee's deliberations, I wonder whether in the mean time my noble friend could reassure your Lordships about the safeguards in the Bill to ensure that these lawful activities are protected.
	I conclude by thank my noble friend for putting this Bill forward and for her eloquent use of words.

Lord Brett: My Lords, we recognise that the City of Westminster is a local authority which holds a unique place not only in the life of the capital, but in the life of the nation. The noble Baroness will perhaps agree with that view, given her distinguished service as a former member of the council and, indeed, as lady mayoress. The contributions from other speakers in the debate have also added to our appreciation of the contents of the Bill. The Government aim to continually develop our wider thinking on how best to regulate the areas of street trading and pedlary in Great Britain. I should of course make it clear right from the start that the Government, as per normal, do not take any view on the content of private Bills; they are a matter for Parliament to decide.
	I will address my remarks to the wider considerations raised by Westminster's Bill and the extent to which they reflect our thinking about street trading today. I noted in the contributions of both my noble friend Lord Graham and the noble Lord, Lord De Mauley, from the Official Opposition's Front Bench, the question of why local and not national action is taken. The truth is that the scale of the problem that these private Acts attempt to address remains unclear nationally. Under 5 per cent of local authorities have sought to introduce legislation in this area, but the Government have conducted and recently published research into street trading and pedlary in the UK in order better to establish the evidence for whether national action is required. The Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform will be consulting widely over the summer on the findings of that research and on possible regulatory options—for example, an updating of the Pedlars Act 1871, and the need for a flexible regime of enforcement in respect of the current regime under the Local Government (Miscellaneous Provisions) Act 1982.
	In that context, I should like first to make reference to the research project begun on the Government's behalf by Durham University last June and concluded last November. That project gathered the views of hundreds of stakeholders from local authority, police, town centre management and pedlary backgrounds, all with views to offer on the current legislative position. More information on the project's outcomes is available in the consumers' area of BERR's website, and copies of the research are available in the Library. Further contact with individuals and organisations with a contribution to make to that dialogue is vital, and I shall say more about how we will take this forward shortly.
	As I indicated a moment ago, where Westminster leads, other authorities follow, hence the 1999 Act; that is certainly the case where street-trading legislation is concerned. The 1999 Act was to some extent the template followed by a number of local authorities seeking to augment their powers via private Bills on street trading in recent years. Reference has been made to Bournemouth, but Canterbury, Leeds, Manchester City, Nottingham and Reading are awaiting their day in court, as one might say, before the Committee in the other place. Differing views about these Bills were aired during the debates in the other place about nine months ago. I commend the Hansard record of 12 June to those noble Lords interested in learning more about the objections to and support for what might be called the bigger picture. We have heard that this Bill has attracted petitions against it from interested parties. A group representing pedlar interests has commented on the perpetuation of the restriction on certified pedlars' activities. We heard also that concerns have been expressed by the National Market Traders Federation about adjustments to the licensing and appeals processes, as well as by Associated Newspapers Ltd, commenting on new powers in respect of the location of news vendors.
	In furtherance of the objectives, noble Lords may also be interested to know that officials from BERR will be involving those authorities who have proposed new legislation, some six or seven of them, in further discussions about their Bills later this month, and of course Westminster will have a seat at the table. That ongoing dialogue will continue into the summer as future changes which may affect street trading and pedlary legislation are consulted upon nationally in the light of the aforementioned research. I should emphasise to the House that effective consultation is particularly important to pedlars, as our research reveals that they are apprehensive about their relationship with some local authorities. They may lack a dedicated organisation to make their case, but none the less they have made their voices heard clearly—as they should be—through BERR's research, and will be able to do so in the forthcoming consultation dialogue. It is against this background of possible longer term change to national legislation that the City of Westminster has proposed a Bill to address the particular problems it is experiencing now. Some of these problems may remind other authorities of their situation, so the points I make may have a wider audience than just those in the Chamber today. I also imagine close attention may be paid to developments concerning this Bill and the others currently in the other place via the parliamentary website.
	As I have said, the Government do not have a view on the Bill. However, we are aware of the issues it raises. Perhaps I should say—in a sense, this is the dog that does not bark—that there are protections in existing legislation that go towards meeting the problems that crop up in the Bill and elsewhere. Therefore, in order to respond, particularly to the points raised by the noble Lord, Lord De Mauley, who generously offered me the opportunity to write to him in detail, I will take up that invitation so that I do not detain the House too long.
	That concludes my response, except to say that I note there are other technical points concerning the Bill that officials in departments other than BERR have raised. Those points, and others, may receive consideration in the Select Committee. I thank the noble Baroness again for her introduction of the Bill. She made it possible for me to present to the House a brief overview of the wider points involved in any consideration of street trading legislation and the Government's immediate plans in respect of street trading activity. I suspect that many local authorities, pedlars and others who have an interest in this policy area will follow developments with interest. I confirm that I will write to the Minister in BERR responsible for this matter and his opposite numbers in other departments to draw their attention to the Hansard record of this debate, which will be helpful to them.

Baroness Gardner of Parkes: My Lords, I thank all noble Lords who have taken part in the debate. Many points have been raised that are of great interest. The Select Committee will certainly want to go into them very thoroughly. Pedlars were mentioned by all noble Lords, except the Minister, and even he might have mentioned them, but not in the same detail. The noble Lord, Lord Graham, is right that a licence is a licence to live. I thought that was a very important point. However, there is no thought of attempting to take away anyone's livelihood. I slightly regret the loss of the hereditary system—I was disappointed when we lost the hereditary system here—but one has to appreciate that there is an equality issue, and it may be something that the council does not control and is obliged by other legislation to take away that right. If the Select Committee could come up with some way whereby the council could keep that as a continuing right, I would be only too pleased because I think it is a pity.
	As the noble Lord, Lord Graham, and other noble Lords said, markets are a very important part of the shopping scene. The scene is changing in markets. When I first came to London, I lived very close to Portobello Market and went every week for all my fruit and vegetables. If you go to Portobello Market now, you are lucky to find more than one or two fruit and vegetables stalls. The place has become an antique market. My local market in Bicester and other markets in London are becoming all clothes. That is a shame because we are all looking for the farmers' markets that are starting up. They are a new thing, and perhaps they are replacing the food. Food purchases have always been a big thing in markets and are very important.
	My noble friend Lord Lucas queried the need for councils to control what is sold in markets. There is a need, partly because of the point I have just made, but also because powers to control what is sold by market traders exist. There is nothing new in the Bill about that. My noble friend Lord Lucas always makes interesting points on Private Bills as on most things. I liked what he said about liking London messy and rumbustious, but a lot of other people do not want it to be too messy. A lot of foreign tourists say to me that London is dirty. That is a great shame. We need a certain degree of control. I raised the issue of chestnut vendors with the people writing the Bill because, over the years, it has always been a great thing that in London you had the smell of the roasting chestnuts in season. I am told that there is no likelihood of that vanishing, so I was pleased by that.
	My noble friend Lord Lucas seemed to think that the council wants to move to covered markets. Covered markets are totally different from street markets. There is no suggestion whatever of that happening. Westminster Council values its street markets; it does not have many of them, but it values them, and people who live near them and even people who live some distance away and still make a point of visiting them value them. There is no suggestion of moving people out of ordinary markets. Someone mentioned changing people's pitches. That might be a positive rather than a negative thing, because, on days when not all stalls are there, a market can become very spread out. Under the flexibility in the Bill, the council could arrange that on days when only half the stalls are there, they bunch up together. That is easier and provides more atmosphere. If you have to walk a long way, you are not likely to walk to the isolated stall in the distance because there is no one in between.
	The noble Baroness, Lady Hamwee, mentioned other boroughs. It is true that London is changing and that things are spreading out, but the Bill might prove such a success that other boroughs may propose similar Bills. It may be proved that there is a need for a variety, but we must wait to see how it works. The point that I keep making is that very little in the Bill is a change from the 1999 Act, so most of it is in operation now and has been shown to work well. Consultation must and will continue.
	I must comment on pedlars, because they have been mentioned by almost everyone. One problem is that to get a pedlar's licence, all you have to do is go to your local constabulary and pay just under £13. That is widely different in cost from a street trader's licence. Many pedlars then attempt to operate as street traders, which is quite unfair to street traders. They are different categories. The Pedlars Act goes back a great way in history, but the problem in Westminster has been that there has been no enforcement to differentiate and stop the illegal street traders who claim to be pedlars.
	The typical question is: how long do you have to be in a location before you are classified as a trader? The answer is that if you are there for up to 20 minutes, you are still a pedlar, but if you stay there after 20 minutes, you are a trader. Should enforcement officers have to stand and watch someone for 20 minutes and then move him on? The Bill makes no change whatever to the position of pedlars, but enforcement might be more possible.
	There are many other points to be considered. Let me check whether there is anything desperately important that I have not commented on. I must comment on the remarks of my noble friend Lord De Mauley. The lawful activities of traders will be protected. That is the aim of the Bill. First, that is nothing to do with pedlars; secondly, the other Bills that he mentioned can be clearly distinguished from this one.
	A point that no one has mentioned is that the Bill would allow the council to determine how many tables and chairs can be set out on the footpath. I remember a time when that was not allowed in London at all. I think that it adds greatly to the street scene that people can. At the moment, you can have permission to put tables and chairs out there for only six months. Under the Bill, you could have that permission for up to three years before you have to apply to renew it. It would be much easier for people running those restaurants to know that they have that degree of continuity.
	So there are good things in the Bill. It is a detailed Bill; there is an awful lot in it. I could go on and on, but I will not, because I know that everyone wants to be getting home. I thank everyone who has taken part today. Every word said today will, I am sure, be carefully considered by the Select Committee, and I ask noble Lords to give the Bill a Second Reading.
	Bill read a second time and committed to a Select Committee.

House adjourned at 3.20 pm.
	Correction
	On Thursday 12 March, Lord Haworth should have been recorded as voting Not-Content in Division 1, in place of Lord Howarth of Newport. On Thursday 5 March, Lord Parekh should have been recorded as voting Not-Content in Division 1, in place of Lord Pannick.